We love GitHub. We work in the open. We have well over 100 public projects on GitHub and contribute to many others. We’ve helped dozens of NGOs, International Organizations, and Government Agencies to open source their code on GitHub.

When we redesigned our website, we wanted to promote open source and to make it easy to find our code on GitHub. So we created GitHub cards.

What’s a GitHub Card?

A GitHub card is a styled card that clearly calls out that this is an open source project, links to the project on GitHub, and shows statistics like forks and stargazers that show the depth of the community around that tool.

A GitHub card example

GitHub cards are a visual way to promote open source and to make it easier for others to participate in our projects by requesting features or contributing code.

Let a Thousand GitHub Cards Bloom

GitHub cards aren’t natively supported by GitHub. We built them into our site using a simple visual wrapper and a bit of code to pull live data from our public GitHub repos.

We’d love to see more sites use GitHub cards. A simple visual flag for open projects across websites can reinforce how much of the web is built on open technologies. There are solid open source options for nearly any technology need. GitHub cards can make them more obvious.

If you want to add GitHub cards to your own site, feel free to use our code. Its open.

Update: Within a few hours or posting, @gmaclennan from Digital Democracy built a tool to generate github cards. Awesome. Check it out:

[http://lab.digital-democracy.org/github-card/?repo=digidem/github-card&title=Github Card&link=http://lab.digital-democracy.org/github-card](http://lab.digital-democracy.org/github-card/?repo=digidem/github-card&title=Github Card&link=http://lab.digital-democracy.org/github-card)