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Occasional Contributors

Question: How do we understand the number of occasional contributors and the contributions that they make?

Description

Occasional contributors are people who make contributions to a project on an irregular basis. Occasional contributors are important to recognize in a community as their contributions can serve to advance the project in meaningful ways. One precise definition of an occasional contributor is “someone who hasn’t submitted a pull request in at least 3 months and hasn’t had more than 12 pull requests overall in the project” [1].

There are several reasons for being an occasional contributor including:

  • A person has a bug they need fixed
  • A person works for a company and the company requires a fix or feature.
  • A person needs to get their project to run on specific hardware
  • A person is fixing a typo.
  • A person is participating in a time-boxed event for a specific purpose or goal.
  • A person may have intended to stick around, but decided that the community or project was not a good fit for them.
  • A person may have intended to stick around, but may have experienced a life event that limited their participation in open source.

Objectives

Monitoring occasional contributors can help to understand if:

  • More people are looking at the project
  • More people are using the project
  • More people are contributing to the project
  • Increases in community contributions in connection with specific events
  • The contribution and onboarding process is working well
  • There is an imbalance in diversity between sustained and occasional contributors
  • A community is welcoming to diverse contributors

Implementation

Filters

  • Minimum number of contributions before someone is no longer an occasional contributor
  • Maximum length of time between contributions before someone is no longer considered an occasional contributor
  • Percentage of overall contributors who are classified as occasional contributors
  • Repeat occasional contributors

Visualizations

Occasional Contributors Augur

From Augur, Endpoint https://tinyurl.com/augur-flyby Augur API Documentation: https://tinyurl.com/augur-flyby-docs

Occasional Contributors Cauldron

From: https://cauldron.io/

Tools Providing the Metric

References

Contributors

  • Matt Germonprez
  • Regina Nkemchor Adejo
  • Dawn Foster
  • Kevin Lumbard
  • Vinod Ahuja