Playbook

Every GitHub activity—from pull requests to issues reported to repos starred—is a signal commercial open-source software companies can use to identify and prioritize in-market accounts.

But these signals don’t just happen in the repositories you own 🤔

In this playbook, we’ll show you how to track GitHub activity across any public repo, uncover the people and organizations behind the signals, and use this intelligence to outbound in-market accounts.

What you’ll need:

Step 1: Connect GitHub repo to Common Room

Let’s say we’re a COSS company geared toward engineers at enterprise organizations.

We already have our own GitHub repo connected to Common Room, but we want to monitor activity across alternative open-source projects, too 🕵️

We’d log in to Common Room, go to Settings (the little ⚙️ icon at the bottom of the left sidebar), click Signals and integrations, and choose GitHub.

Next we’d click on Add another signal.

Since we don’t have admin access to the repo in question, we’d click on GitHub API token.

From here we’d follow the step-by-step directions to create a new personal access token and copy-paste it into the appropriate box.

Then we’d input the appropriate GitHub URL and click List repositories.

This will generate a dropdown menu where we can choose which repos we want to import into Common Room.

Once we’ve selected our repos, we’d click Begin import and the associated data will start flowing into Common Room.

We can follow the same process for any other public repo we want.

Step 2: Capture, enrich, and analyze signals

After the data is imported into Common Room, it’s treated just like data from our owned GitHub repo.

Activity data is auto-captured and enriched via Person360™, Common Room’s AI-powered identity resolution and waterfall enrichment engine.

Whenever an activity is detected—such as a pull request, commit, fork, discussion, issue, or star—Person360 creates a profile for the person and account associated with it. If a person or account is already tracked in our Common Room instance, the activity is added to their existing profile.

Signals from GitHub and any other connected data sources—like website activity, product usage, social engagements, community interactions, and more—are deanonymized and enriched to create a unified profile.

Names, job titles, work histories, contact information, cross-channel activities, firmographic details—they’re all revealed in an instant.

If we want to hone in on contacts and organizations from certain repos, we can click Signals from the Contacts, Organizations, or Activity screens to filter for specific ones.

We can then drill down further using filters.

Let’s say we want to see if engineers who work at a company that matches our ideal customer profile are reporting issues with an alternative software.

It could be a good chance to reach out and show how we compare.

We’d select the appropriate repo from the Contacts screen and click Add filter.

Then we’d click Role and choose Engineering.

Next we’d click Add filter, choose Organization tags, and select Ideal customer profile.

Finally, we’d click Add filter, choose GitHub, select # of Issues, and configure it to filter for contacts who have reported one or more issues.

Now we have a list of contacts who work at orgs that match our ICP and may be having problems with an alternative software.

We can always create automated alerts to track these individuals and notify us in real time.

Or we can create auto-replenishing segments that add these contacts to dedicated lists on autopilot 🛩️

For now, let’s just work on getting in touch with the right stakeholders.

Step 3: Outbound in-market accounts

We have a list of contacts showing interest in (and challenges with) a software similar to ours, but we want to talk to above-the-line stakeholders who are more likely to have budget authority.

So we’d click into a contact’s organization and navigate to the Prospector tab.

From here we can surface economic buyers at the organization based on our custom fit criteria—such as job title, location, job-change history, and even LinkedIn follower count—and add them to Common Room, regardless of whether they’re currently tracked across our connected data sources.

These new contacts will then be deanonymized and enriched via Person360, revealing their email addresses, phone numbers, and social handles.

We can then get in touch with these contacts directly from Common Room 🙌

We’d simply click the dropdown arrow next to their names to add them to a personalized outbound sequence, Salesforce campaign, or HubSpot workflow.

And if we’ve connected our sequencing tool to Common Room, we can let our AI copilot—RoomieAI™—craft a message for us using the signals captured in Common Room.

Our message might look something like this:

Wrapping up

There it is, wrapped in a bow 🎁

Now you can track activity in any public GitHub repo, identify and prioritize in-market accounts, and reach out with relevance to the right stakeholders—all in one place.

Want to see a playbook on a different topic? Get in touch. And if you haven’t already, try Common Room for free.