Evolution of our contributors in Fedora
By Pierre-Yves on Tuesday, February 4 2014, 15:08 - Général - Permalink
As you may know, Fedora is under-going a rather large change with Fedora.Next proposition/evolution. One of the point that Fedora.Next addresses is the loss of users observed in Fedora for few years.
The statistics page on the wiki as well as my own representation of the same numbers are both out-dated so we don't really have a clear view on this.
However, since October 2012, all the messages sent onto the fedmsg bus are being stored in datanommer. And that's information we can use to see how we're doing with regards to our contributors.
I asked and got a dump of the datanommer database (the data is anyway publicly accessible in datagrepper) and ran my traditional script on it to gather some numbers.
I generated on a daily, weekly and monthly basis the graph of the number of (distinct) active contributors we have.
Here are the results :-)
Three interesting periods:
- the period without any messages in March 2013 is the period where the bus was down and we did not realize it (since we have a nagios check for the bus)
- on the daily graph you can really see the dip created by Christmas and its holidays
- on the monthly graph, the pick in August 2013 coincides with Flock and the launch of badges!
Looking at the graph generated by this week in fedora, in December we launched COPR and it seems that the number of posts on the planet has also quite increased in December and January. Does this alone explain the bump we observe here?
Comments
While I would like to see Copr as cause, the true is that "only" 117 developers submited at least one task to Copr so far. So it could not justify jump of 1500 heads.
And do not forget that in December was released Fedora 20.
As Fedora ambassador some times I struggle to make presentations without any statistics. It is a reasonable question to ask: "How many people use Fedora".
But recently I have think about other concern. What is the burn out rate of Fedora collaborators? What is the average time that a person is an active collaborator? This may lead us to think about when will be most useful to sponsor people to events. In the other hand, we can find out a threshold, that people with more than "x" years, will keep going. Another issue to take into account is about their employer, obviously people hired by Red Hat to do stuff in Fedora should have a different metrics.
@ Neville, This will be quite tricky as we mostly do not register when people leave. Maybe they'll deactivate their account but mostly not and I'm not sure (I'm in fact pretty sure in most cases we are not).
@Mirek, you're just being modest there ;-)
But then either we have much more contributors (and F20 is much more popular than the previous ones) or it's related to the bump in planet related fedmsg messages we can see in thisweekinfedora.org