Announced at its last Universe conference, Team discussions aim to power processes like planning, analysis, design, and others directly from within GitHub.
As GitHub’s Katie Sipos wrote, Team discussions aim to fill a gap in GitHub collaboration tools, which all too often drives developers to handle all kinds of project-related decision-making discussions through comments to issues. This has the effect of cluttering the view on what is actually required to be changed in code, as well as of hiding the discussions themselves.
Accessing discussions is as easy as selecting a team from the new right sidebar, which takes you to the list of discussions within that team. Starting a new discussion only requires typing the topic of that discussion into the relevant input field.
Discussions are public to all members of an organization by default. This means anyone can read any discussions by any teams and can register for notifications to stay up to date if they want. Discussions can also be made into private discussions, though. Private discussions can only be accessed by direct team members.
The new feature is already available on GitHub dashboard but not yet available at the API level. Support for this is coming soon, says Sipos, but a timeline has not been provided.