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Today

How did you determine the number of members per project?

Posted by Eike on August 28, 2007 at 10:49 AM CEST #

It is the number of members signed up for each project.
E.g. the Calc project's list is here: http://sc.openoffice.org/servlets/ProjectMemberList.
25 pages times 20 members + 5 on the last page is 505 members for the spreadsheet project.
You can welcome 2 new members since I counted. Congratulations!

Posted by Matthias on August 28, 2007 at 12:53 PM CEST #

That's what I feared. Sorry I have to tell you, but the project member lists are absolutely meaningless and probably also swamped with dead entries. Most people apply for an Observer account because they don't know better. It doesn't give them any benefit except a notice in case someone published a "project announcement". The number of Observer accounts doesn't say anything about activity in the project. It is also not related to subscribers of the mailing lists, which probably would give a better indication of member interests. In fact, given our infrastructure and how we use it, CollabNet could as well completely remove that Observer thing from the project member stuff.

For the Developer status on the other hand the project member list isn't needed for commit rights in the core source code repository, because to 99% that is handled by the Domain Developer list.

The only context in which the project member list is needed is for Content Developer status and similar, which is the case for native language projects and web page content, and the CanConfirm status for IssueZilla.

Posted by Eike on August 28, 2007 at 01:55 PM CEST #

Yes, that is true - the correlation between project member count and the activity of a project is very faint (and I never stated the opposite). I am happy to create another chart that better describes the activity for a project. Just gimmie a hint how to collect better numbers with a reasonable amount of effort...

Posted by Matthias on August 28, 2007 at 02:30 PM CEST #

[Trackback] ‘Lies damn lies nad statistics’. Don’t know who said this, but good statistics of community interest and participation in open source projects are hard to come by. Matthias Mueller-Prove gave it a shot to measure the size of the OpenO...

Posted by Plan-B for Software Documentation on August 28, 2007 at 08:29 PM CEST #

I had a long time resentation about OOo 'My Community'. The presentation is honestly not that well presented, but is CC so if anyone want to contribute and enrich the slides they are all welcome. I have translated into english for a talk I did at North Texas Linux User Group (NTLUG) in Dallas.

You can see the presentation at my SlideShare:

http://www.slideshare.net/jza/openofficeorg-my-community/

Posted by JZA on August 29, 2007 at 02:50 PM CEST #

Can you try to make another ManyEyes with the number of posts to their mailing lists? :)

For example:

http://ja.openoffice.org/servlets/SummarizeList?listName=discuss
15668
http://fr.openoffice.org/servlets/SummarizeList?listName=discuss
8415
http://fr.openoffice.org/servlets/SummarizeList?listName=discuss
N/A

http://fr.openoffice.org/servlets/SummarizeList?listName=users
63215
http://de.openoffice.org/servlets/SummarizeList?listName=users
69151
http://ja.openoffice.org/servlets/SummarizeList?listName=users
N/A

Thanks.

Posted by khirano on August 29, 2007 at 05:01 PM CEST #

well, I took the 6 largest language projects (by number of members), and put the mail traffic of the main dev/discuss lists for the past 12 months into a table. See the visualizations at
1) http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/SIk76IsOtha6XZGkiwagI2-
2) http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/SIk76IsOtha6tZ0RM5bgI2-

just a test to play a bit with the possibilities. Creating the table is tedious work
-Matthias

Posted by Matthias on August 29, 2007 at 06:30 PM CEST #

Following on Eike and khirano's comment, what about taking the number of participants to the lists, not the number of mails :)

Posted by JC Helary on August 30, 2007 at 03:40 AM CEST #