Based on the feedback we received from various open source communities regarding incorrect representation of the community strength, we realized that the inconsistencies were because we included all types of activities performed on Github in our query to compute code contributors. This included the community members who only reacted by means of emojis on either a PR or an issue.
We analyzed over 8K GitHub repos to understand the pattern and found that the community members who were exclusively reacting to Github activities were more so project fans than actual code contributors. Hence we have now updated our queries to compute contributor analytics on the trends dashboard to not include the contributions coming in the form of only reactions i.e emojis on Github PRs, Commits, or Issues.
This means that our definition of a code contributor now includes the following activities:
Commit authored/co-authored
PR submitted/reviewed/commented/approved/merged
Changeset submitted/approved/rejected/merged
Issue submitted/commented/closed/rejected
This change only affects projects that use Github as their source control system as well as to manage bugs or issues.
Due to this change, you may see changes in the overall contributor stats reported on the trends dashboard. This change mainly affects the metrics reported for Contributor Strength, Contributor Growth and Retention, and New Contributor Growth.
Thank you for providing your valuable feedback. We are always looking for ways to improve and will continue to provide better analytics for all our communities.
Within FINOS we use GitHub Issues to set agendas and record project meeting minutes.
As part of this engagement, project meeting attendees use GitHub Issue comments to register their project meeting participation with a simple hello or emoji. Please see the example below …
With financial services being a regulated industry, being able to record and measure the FINOS Project and SIG participation through GitHub comments is a very important reporting mechanism for community growth.
Can FINOS be an exception to the rule explained in this article as financial services doesn’t have complete freedom to engage in code contributions, so attending project meetings is also seen as a form of contribution?
Hi @James_McLeod, @sgupta would be better versed to answer your request on making an exception for FINOS to this update.
But just throwing ideas out there, I wonder how many other users would like comments to be represented as contributions for certain use cases. It may be useful to allow users to toggle on and off or even filter the contribution strength charts by contribution type and include comments.
Also as an FYI- if you are using LFX meeting management we have an update coming out by April that will grab recordings and a transcript of the users that attended past project meetings, and I believe we’re including a calendar to Insights where you can access this information for public meetings as well. So other community members will also be represented in Insights, @sgupta it may be a good idea to include meeting participant data into the aggregate contribution strength charts.
Thanks for reaching out and raising this concern which is critical for our Finos community. I would like to add to the information presented in the original post by saying that we are only filtering out individuals who are simply reacting to comments on either a PR or an issue. Meaning that the users who use the quick reactions on PRs or issue activities. In other words, any contributor who is adding an emoji (or any unicode letters) as a comment on either a PR or an issue is still considered as an active contributor.
So going by the example you shared, everyone attending meetings and adding their attendance by means of a comment on an issue will be and should be considered in the computation of active contributors.
Hope this helps.
Please let us know if there are any concerns or questions.
Yes @Henry_Quaye you are right we will be pulling the meetings data from LFX Meeting Management into Insights and this feature will be available in the next release of Insights in the coming months.
There is a distinction between a code contribution and a community contribution. I believe there should be multiple measures of contribution to the project as a whole. There are a lot of measures that take into account non-code activities as well as to other activities. This will be an iterative process.
