We’re glad to announce our new partnership with the OpenInfra Foundation! OpenInfra and Bitergia agree to partner in providing metrics to OpenInfra projects. In this blog post, we want to share with you the details about the partnership and the OpenInfra Summit 2022!
Continue reading “Announcing our new Partnership with OpenInfra: launching at the OpenInfra Summit ‘22”Contributors and Contributions: the right tool to have the right metrics
At Bitergia we work with contributions and contributors to get metrics about them. Both meanings seem clear, however, both of them can be a little ambiguous, so in this blog post we are going to see what is a contribution and a contributor in the most famous free culture communities to see that sometimes the right tool gives you the right insight that you need.
The Free Culture CV
As we shared in the EsLibre Conference, our bitergian Pablo Hinojosa talked about there’s currently no common way to collect all of our contributions to any community, and we analyzed the current state, possibilities, and an outline of the technical implementation to have a self-generated CV of a contributor.
Example of Github contributor metrics using lowlighter/metrics
There are dozens of free communities where you can contribute, but there is no single place where you can count and display your contributions.
There are approaches to see your Github contributions and linktr.ee or key base that allow you to collect links of several communities you belong to, but there is no CV of contributions to free culture.
We debated a proposal -based on free software- to generate this CV and show our contributions in quantitative terms on the various platforms that exist on the internet.
Contributors and Contributions: What are they?
Firstly, is clear that a contribution is a change in the content of a community meanwhile, the contributor is the person who makes this contribution, lets deep dive into each of them to understand more about:
Contributors
Let’s start with a contributor. Is a contributor always a person? A contributor is a person but can be a bot too. That means a contributor is not always a person (even when the bot account is linked to another account of a person). Is a contributor an account of the platform? A contributor usually is an account of the platform, but since some communities like Wikimedia (Wikipedia… Wikimedia Commons…) accept anonymous contributions, you cannot state always a contributor is an account of a person.
Information about contributors at Wikimedia Stats
There are more questions like the two above. For example, is a contributor an account without contributions? Is a contributor a person who attends events but does not contribute (just contribute to spreading the word) or a sponsor?
Finally, not every contributor contributes in the same way and with the same activity. That is why the Wikipedia account has several user rights levels or some communities have active contributors and inactive contributors.
Contributions
Let’s continue with contributions. We stated that It is a change in the content of a community. For example in Github a contribution is a change in the code (commits with lines of code), but… is a reply in an issue a contribution?
In Wikipedia we measure the contributions in bytes, but if somebody says a hoax or common criticism of Wikipedia and another person argues and defends the community, is it not that person a contributor? Even when that person is not changing bytes.
GitLive real-time Github contributions
Or in OpenFoodFacts we have similar examples. In the list of ways you can contribute, you can see “add products” and “complete products”, which is a change in the content of the community, but they have both: “Tell the world” and “make it local” that are no changes in the content by itself, they are contributions in the way to make bigger the community, which is another kind of contribution.
How do we measure and get contributors and contributions metrics?
As you can see in the previous section, in terms of contributions, each community has a way to measure its contributions. For Wikimedia communities use the bytes, Github and Gitlab use commits (changes in lines of code) and OpenStreetMaps uses uploaded GPS points, nodes, ways, and relations.
Two nice ways to measure in real-time the current contributions of a community, in this case, Wikipedia and Github, are Listen to Wikipedia and GitLive.
Both tools give you an understanding of how big and active are these communities (Wikimedia has more than 68 million users and Github has more than 83 million “developers”), but it is difficult to get information segregated by the organization, repository, or language.

To measure and get contributors and contributions, at Bitergia we use Sorting Hat to manage the identities of the contributors in each community (data source), and we rely on the Onion model to perform an analysis based on the contributions, naming “core” to those contributing 80% of the activity, “regular” to those contributing the next 15% of the activity and “casual” to those contributing the last 5% of the activity.
As you can see, analyze contributor’s contributions can be a challenging task. If you need help with this issue, you can contact us and drop any question that you have. Also, to see how Cauldron or Bitergia Analytics Platform can help you to understand how your community and/or developers are contributing you can request a demo here.
OpenInfra Summit 22: our event summary
The OpenInfra Summit was back and we went to Berlin, Germany! We had amazing experiences with keynotes and sessions from users like Volvo, Adobe, Bloomberg, China Mobile, and more. In this blog, we want to recap our participation in the event as Official Partners, a walk through the different activities, and the sessions on the Community Metrics Corner.
Continue reading “OpenInfra Summit 22: our event summary”The first release of Bitergia Analytics Platform based on OpenSearch.
As we know, Elastic no longer releases new versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana under an open source license. One of Bitergia’s core values is to always maintain our work in an open source environment. For these reasons, we are migrating to OpenSearch and now have the first release ready and deployed with the first customers.
Continue reading “The first release of Bitergia Analytics Platform based on OpenSearch.”Why it’s a good time to set up an OSPO in your organization.
90% of IT leaders use open source software in their organizations’ innovation streams. This requires a strategy to manage modern companies’ relationships with the open source projects they use, release, or even contribute to. An open source program office (OSPO) creates this strategy by working across the organization. In this blog post, we want to highlight 5 reasons that your organization can master with an OSPO.
Continue reading “Why it’s a good time to set up an OSPO in your organization.”Our Owl turns 10! Let’s celebrate our anniversary!
We’re celebrating our tenth anniversary in business. Remembering our beginnings in 2012, we want to celebrate and congratulate everyone who was involved from the start or joined along the way! So that’s why in this blog post, we wanted to summarize our 10 years path and review our celebration day.
Continue reading “Our Owl turns 10! Let’s celebrate our anniversary!”The many faces of measuring OSPO success
There are different ways to measure the success of an OSPO (Open Source Program Office). What constitutes success is dependent on the goals of the organization and why it established the OSPO. Whatever the success metrics are, it is important for an OSPO to demonstrate its success. In this blog post, we want to navigate through some strategies that an OSPO can use to measure its success and show its value to the organization.
Continue reading “The many faces of measuring OSPO success”Metrics for everyone: How Bitergia Analytics satisfies different needs
The Bitergia Analytics services can be effective for many different tasks. Our different user profiles have various metrics and goals and work in many industry sectors, teams, or business. Each one of them can customize the tool to their specific needs.
In this blog post, we want to dive into the analysis of different types of profiles or teams that can use Bitergia Analytics for their daily work.
Continue reading “Metrics for everyone: How Bitergia Analytics satisfies different needs”How Bitergia Analytics can work with your objectives: analyzing use cases.
The need to understand how open source software is built has never been greater. Today, 90% of IT leaders use open source for their organizations and value streams, and they need to quickly identify risks and opportunities to succeed and to reach the objectives they have. In this blog, we want to highlight some cases about the experiences of our customers on how Bitergia Analytics services works for them in their daily tasks and to reach these objectives.
Continue reading “How Bitergia Analytics can work with your objectives: analyzing use cases.”Bitergia Analytics vs. Cauldron Cloud
The need to understand how open source software is built has never been greater. Today, 90% of IT leaders use open source for their organizations and value streams. Thus, they need to quickly identify risks and opportunities to succeed. This blog post is about two solutions that Bitergia offers: Bitergia Analytics and Cauldron Cloud.
