How do we measure contributor growth?

Project Discussion
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I’ve spent the past few months working to make more of our data available for Fedora community members to dig into. One of my goals is to help answer a key question from Fedora’s 2028 strategy: How do we measure and understand our progress toward doubling the number of contributors?

As I’ve explored the data and have been examining how different parts of Fedora overlap, I keep returning to a problem that is bigger than just looking at the data however. The question of how do we measure that contributor number as a whole?

An idea I want to throw out to the community for feedback on is instead of focusing on a single contribution metric or trying to pin down one exact definition of “contribution,” it may be better to look at the different ways community members contribute around the project and start to think about how we double those areas individually (looked at by different message bus topics) based on the number of users we see interacting with Fedora.

To bring it back to a Fedora wide view of growth, this could mean asking are we adding more Ask Fedora moderators, more users reporting bugs in Bugzilla during testing, or seeing more users adding new packages to what will become our future state Git Forge (currently dist-git). If we want to see overall growth, we should also see growth across all of these areas, though each may evolve differently and needs a different take on how we bring more of Fedora to more people. This could change how we think about the growth of our community and maybe help make this easier to digest by viewing it by the different ways Fedora contribution is done.

For example, the chart below shows a summary of recent data from the message bus and may be useful to set out a goal post for us and kick off this conversation if this makes sense or not as a way to start thinking about our goal as a community (the blog post accompanying this also links to and includes how I came to this information):

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If you’re wondering what the heck happened in the past two weeks with Pagure and new users, I also am trying to figure that out still myself. Seems like bot spam but still looking.

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I think doing this in a more granular way is a excellent idea.
Instead of just looking at a ‘number of contributors’ we could make a bunch of different areas and track those. That could very much help in fact if we gain a bunch of packagers, but say docs goes down, or vice versa.

We would still need to come up with those areas to watch tho… but thats probibly easier than ‘what is a contibutor’. :wink:

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