GitHub forced owners on every repo, scrapped 8k unused in 45 days
GitHub audited its internal org and discovered over 11,000 active repos with no clear owner. By mandating a custom‑property ownership field, they validated owners for all active repos, archived roughly 8,000 abandoned ones, and built notification fallbacks to prevent future orphaning. The move tightened secret‑rotation workflows and gave security teams a reliable owner loop.