Open Source Business Metrics: Contributor Metrics
Metric Description:
Tracking contributors still matters, but the way in which you do it makes a difference. Several projects have a handful of large corporate entities that contribute heavily to the code base of a project. You'll see spikes in contributors over time when in reality, those indicate when a new company joined the ecosystem. Tracking the companies, as well as the individuals who contribute, can help mitigate this. If a company or individual cares enough about the project to contribute to it, you are seeing growth. You can track such metrics in GitHub/GitLab, Bitergia, or in a tool like Orbit or Common Room that aggregates multiple sources.
The caveat is that measuring the overall growth of all advocates, not just the code contributors, is difficult. Besides examining the number of people contributing to the code, you also want to look at the number of people releasing videos, blogs, talks, and other content into your ecosystem. These soft contributions can show project growth and success even better than hardcore code metrics, but tracking them is often manual.
Example Metrics:
- # of active code contributors
- # of total code contributors
- # of total code contributors
- # of first time contributors
- # of open/closed prs
- % of PRs closed without merging
- # of external speakers
- # of external blogs
- # of opened/closed issues
- # of forks
- # of clones
Goals:
If we are looking at this purely from a business perspective we are looking for growing number of contributors to the community and ecosystem. Long term sustainability should extend these, but will remain out of scope for this guide.External Links
- https://ossinsight.io/
- https://chaoss.community/metrics/
- https://opensource.guide/metrics/
- https://opensource.com/article/18/5/metrics-project-success