# Automate your GitHub triage process

Quickly find and prioritize GitHub activity that needs a response.

**Teams:**  
Developer Relations, Sales

**Sources:**  
 [GitHub](/content/docs/signals/community-and-social-integrations/github/ "GitHub"/index.html)

### Overview

GitHub is where open-source happens. It’s where developers communicate, collaborate, and contribute.

And when your product is available on GitHub, your developer relations and go-to-market teams naturally want to know what’s happening and how to respond.

Sometimes that means squashing bugs. Other times it means talking about your managed services with a user who fits your ideal customer profile (ICP). Either way, the hard part is keeping pace—and knowing how to separate the signal from the noise.

In this playbook, we’ll show you how to uncover the GitHub activity you may be missing, stay updated on it in real time, and zero in on what matters most.

**What you’ll need:**

- Common Room (this is how we’ll find and filter GitHub activity— [Request a demo](/content/demo/?website_attribution=playbooks%252Fautomate-your-github-triage-process/index.html) to follow along)  
- Access to GitHub

### Step 1: Connect GitHub

We’ll start by connecting [GitHub](https://docs.commonroom.io/get-started/integrations/github) to Common Room.

Log into Common Room, head over to the **Settings** menu in the left sidebar (the little ⚙️ icon at the bottom), and click into **Sources**.

Select GitHub and click **Connect GitHub**.

From here you’ll need to authenticate your account and choose the repositories you want to connect. Keep in mind that this requires admin access or approval.

Once Common Room is installed and authorized to access your GitHub repos, the data will start rolling in.

### Step 2: Filter activity

Hit **Back to app** to leave the **Settings** menu, then click on **Activity** in the left sidebar.

We want to create a priority list of people to follow up with based on their GitHub activity. There are multiple ways to do this, but it all comes down to filters.

You can apply a wide range of [filters](https://docs.commonroom.io/using-common-room/organizations-page/filters-and-sorting) to people, organizations, and activities in Common Room to quickly surface the attributes and actions you care about.

For example, we could click **Add filter**, select **GitHub**, and choose **# of Issues**.

We would put 1 in the **At least** box to surface all GitHub issues.

To spotlight issues that haven’t received a response, we’d click **Add filter** and select **Replies**.

Then we’d choose **No reply**.

Finally, let’s say we want to focus on recent issues. We’d click **Add filter** once again and select **Active between**.

Then we’d choose **Last 7 days**.

Bam—we now have a view of all GitHub issues over the past week that haven’t gotten a response.

Another option is using Common Room’s auto-categories.

Common Room’s [auto-categories](https://docs.commonroom.io/using-common-room/activity-page/auto-categories) feature uses machine learning to automatically group activity into key categories, including product complaints, feature requests, product appreciation, bugs and issues, product questions, messages with content attached, and account support.

All we’d have to do is click **Add filter** and select **Category**.

This will bring up a dropdown list of options. We’ll choose **Product complaint**, **Bug/issue**, **product question**, and **Account support**.

Then we’d once again add our filters for activities that haven’t received a reply over the past seven days.

And just like that, we have an overview of GitHub activity we want to follow up on.

From here we can click into the activity to understand what it’s concerning, as well as view the person’s profile to learn more about them.

### Step 3: Filter for customers and ICP

We want to help all our users, but we also want to make sure we’re giving our current and prospective customers the white-glove treatment.

There are multiple ways to spotlight these individuals using filters, but the easiest and most accurate method involves tags.

You can create both [contact tags](https://docs.commonroom.io/using-common-room/members-page/member-tags) and [organization tags](https://docs.commonroom.io/using-common-room/organizations-page/organization-tags) in Common Room. These help you automatically assign certain designations to individuals and organizations based on preset criteria, as well as filter for them much faster.

Let’s say we’ve created both our Customer and Ideal customer profile tags in Common Room.

The former is based on the data in our CRM (Common Room offers native integrations with both [Salesforce](https://docs.commonroom.io/get-started/integrations/salesforce-crm) and [HubSpot](https://docs.commonroom.io/get-started/integrations/hubspot)), and the latter is based on filters such as company size, revenue, industry, and tech stack.

Check out these playbooks to see how you can set up tags to [identify existing customers](/content/playbooks/identify-existing-customers-in-your-community/index.html) and [identify ideal customers](/content/playbooks/identify-icp-in-community/index.html).

All we’d have to do is click **Add filter** and select **Organization tags**.

Then we’d choose both **Customer** and **Ideal customer profile** from the dropdown list.

Now our view of GitHub activity is focused on the paying customers we want to retain and the companies we want to convert.

### Step 4: Create real-time alerts

Navigate to **Team alerts** in the left sidebar.

We’ll click **Create team alert**, then add a name and description to our alert.

Now it’s time to choose which activities we’ll be notified about.

Common Room lets you create and customize [team alerts](https://docs.commonroom.io/using-common-room/team-alerts-page) based on any criteria you want to instantly get updated on the people, organizations, and activities you care about.

First we’ll choose **New activity** under the trigger section.

Next, we’ll filter for the activity we care about under the filter section by adding our tags under **Organization filters** ( **Customer**, **Ideal customer profile**), **GitHub** under **Contact filters**, and our categories under **Activity filters** ( **Product complaint**, **Bug/issue**, **Product question**, **Account support**).

Finally, we’ll choose where we want to be notified under the action section. In this case, we’ll select an internal Slack channel.

After we hit **Create alert** we’ll get pinged in real time whenever there’s GitHub activity among our current customers and people who work at organizations that match our ICP.

### Wrapping up

There we have it—a GitHub triage list to help us keep our paying customers happy and spotlight opportunities to convert high-fit users.

With this list in hand we can squash bugs, spotlight upsell signals, and do much more faster than ever before.