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New Contributors

Question: How many contributors are making their first contribution to a given project and who are they?

Overview

This metric measures the number of new contributors making their first contribution to a project, offering insight into the project's growth and engagement. Tracking new contributors helps in understanding patterns of participation and potential barriers to engagement, providing opportunities for community support, onboarding, and outreach. A steady influx of new contributors may indicate a healthy, inviting project, while declines can be a signal for potential challenges in engagement or accessibility. This is a specific implementation of the Contributors metric.

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Data Collection Strategies

  • Identify first-time contributions across key community interactions, including code commits, issue creation, pull requests, and code reviews.
  • Track new contributors by time period to analyze trends and changes in project engagement.

Filters

  • Time Period: Track when the first contribution was made.
  • Engagement Type: Identify engagement types such as:
    • Repository authors
    • Issue authors
    • Code review participants
    • Mailing list authors
    • Event participants
    • IRC authors
    • Blog authors
    • By release cycle
    • Timeframe of activity in the project, e.g, find new contributors
    • Programming languages of the project
  • Project Phase: Track the contributor’s stage, from opening a pull request to acceptance.
  • Contributor Role: Determine the function or role within the project (e.g., code author, reviewer, event organizer).

Visualizations

New Contributors Visualization from GrimoireLab Figure 1: Visualization of new contributors' engagement across different project areas using GrimoireLab


References

Contributors

  • Elizabeth Barron
  • Kevin Lumbard
  • Armstrong Foundjem
  • Yigakpoa L. Ikpae

Additional Information

To edit this metric, please submit a Change Request here To reference this metric in software or publications, please use this stable URL: https://chaoss.community/?p=3613

The usage and dissemination of health metrics may lead to privacy violations. Organizations may be exposed to risks. These risks may flow from compliance with the GDPR in the EU, with state law in the US, or with other laws. There may also be contractual risks flowing from terms of service for data providers such as GitHub and GitLab. The usage of metrics must be examined for risk and potential data ethics problems. Please see CHAOSS Data Ethics document for additional guidance.

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