Looking Forward: Dashboard for contributor metrics

Looking Forward: Dashboard for contributor metrics#

Motivation#

Such a tool would give project leads a greater ability to distinguish the variety of new contributors’ experience levels and how that experience maps to the project’s needs with the goal of knowing how to support new contributors and growing their community.

Project leads can use the statistical analysis available in this tool both to analyze the project’s historical progress and to plan key performance metrics for the future.

Metrics to consider in evaluating contributors#

  • Experienced in open-source / Inexperienced in open-source

  • Regular frequency of contribution to a single project / Irregular frequency of contribution to a single project

  • Newly joined the project / Joined the project earlier

Classes of contributor#

  1. Experienced, regular contribution, newly joined

  2. Experienced, regular contribution, joined earlier

  3. Experienced, irregular contribution, newly joined

  4. Experienced, irregular contribution, joined earlier

  5. Inexperienced, regular contribution, newly joined

  6. Inexperienced, regular contribution, joined earlier

  7. Inexperienced, irregular contribution, newly joined

  8. Inexperienced, irregular contribution, joined earlier

Challenge to data access#

Currently, contributor statistics exist in GitHub, but these are publicly available on an individual project level only. This presents a challenge to analysis spanning multiple projects. For example, one individual may be a new contributor to one project, but a core maintainer of a second project, and a regular contributor to a third project. Having programmatic visibility into the entire span of many contributors’ experience across projects can help project leads/maintainers better navigate and nurture the relationships with their contributor base.

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