Use GitHub Activity as Relationship Signal
Groupthink knows who you meet with. For a lot of technical people that misses most of who they actually work with, because the evidence of that relationship is in GitHub instead of on a calendar.
Turn this on and Groupthink reads who you open, co-author, and review pull requests with, and files that collaboration as private, dated entries on the record of the person you worked with.
It is off by default, including for everyone who already had GitHub connected before this shipped. Connecting GitHub is consent to file issues. It is not consent to read your collaboration history into other people's records, so this gets its own switch.
Where it lives
User settings > Connections & Integrations, in the card titled Use GitHub activity as relationship signal. It is the first card in the tab.
If GitHub is not connected yet, the card shows a Connect GitHub button instead of a switch, and tells you to connect GitHub first. See Github for how to connect it.
What gets read
- Pull requests you and another person both worked on.
- Pull requests of yours that someone reviewed.
- Pull requests of theirs that you reviewed.
That is the whole list for now.
What lands on a person's record
A dated entry naming the pull request and the person, with a link to it on GitHub. Something like:
You and Dana Smith both worked on pull request acme/backend#42 "Add rate limiting to the ingest endpoint", merged Aug 5, 2026.
The entry is private to you, the same as every other entry on a relationship record. It also counts as an interaction, so someone you ship with every week stops looking like a cold contact and stops triggering reconnect nudges.
What does not get read
Who and which pull request and when. That is it.
- Your code is not read into anyone's record. Neither is the diff.
- Review comments are not copied into the record.
- Issues, mentions, and assignments are not covered yet.
- Nothing is pushed back to GitHub. This direction is read only.
Scope
This covers every repository your GitHub connection can already see. There is no per-repo picker yet.
If that is broader than you want, narrow it where the connection is defined: change which repositories the Groupthink GitHub App is installed on in GitHub, and this follows.
Groupthink checks recent activity, not your whole history. It looks at pull requests merged in the last several days on each run, so this fills in going forward rather than reconstructing years of past work.
How people get matched
Groupthink matches collaborators to your contacts by email address, using the same addresses already on their record, including secondary ones.
If it cannot match someone, nothing is written. Groupthink does not guess and does not create a contact out of a GitHub account.
One known gap worth knowing about: reviewers are identified by their GitHub username, and Groupthink can only connect a username to an email address when that person also has commits on the same pull request. A reviewer who only reviewed may not be matched yet. We are working on it.
Turning it on
- Connect GitHub if you have not already. See Github.
- Open User settings > Connections & Integrations.
- Find Use GitHub activity as relationship signal at the top of the tab.
- Turn the switch on.
Groupthink checks GitHub once a day rather than the moment a pull request merges, so give the first entries a day to appear.
Turning it off
Turn the same switch off.
That stops future entries. It does not delete entries already written. Those are part of your record, which follows the same rule as every other capture source in Groupthink. If you want a specific entry gone, remove it from the person's record.
Frequently Asked Questions
I already had GitHub connected. Did this start reading my history automatically?
No. Existing connections read as off. Nothing is read until you turn the switch on yourself.
Does this affect routing action items to GitHub issues?
No. That is a separate feature on the same connection and it is unchanged. See Github.
Can I limit it to one repository?
Not from Groupthink yet. Today the scope is whatever your GitHub connection can see. A per-repo picker is not built.
Do the people I collaborate with see any of this?
No. Relationship records are private to you, and nothing is written back to GitHub.
Will it create contacts for people I have never met?
No. Entries land on people already in your records, matched by email address. Someone Groupthink cannot match produces nothing at all.
Will I get entries on my own record?
No. You are never written onto your own record.
I deleted one of these entries and re-ran. Does it come back?
No. A deleted entry is not recreated on a later run.
Related
- Github: connecting GitHub and routing action items to issues.
- Relationship Intelligence: where these entries show up.
Getting Help
Questions about GitHub as a relationship signal? Email support@groupthink.com.