How do you design an organization-wide Dependabot governance policy across many repositories?

At an organizational scale, governance means establishing consistent baseline expectations across every repository rather than leaving Dependabot configuration entirely to each individual repository owner's discretion — balancing central consistency against the reality that different repositories genuinely have different risk profiles and needs.

flowchart TD
    A[Org-wide baseline policy] --> B[Security updates: mandatory everywhere]
    A --> C[Standard dependabot.yml template for version updates]
    A --> D[Required reviewers/labels convention]
    A --> E[Repos can extend, not weaken, the baseline]

Practically, this typically involves: mandating Dependabot security updates/alerts as a non-negotiable baseline across every repository (via organization security settings), providing a standard, reusable dependabot.yml template repositories start from (covering common conventions like grouping, reviewers, and schedule), and establishing clear escalation policies for how quickly critical-severity alerts must be addressed — while still allowing individual repositories some latitude to tune schedule frequency or add ecosystem-specific rules on top of that shared baseline, rather than a rigid one-size-fits-all mandate that ignores real differences between repositories.