This post is brought to you today by the Eclipse EGit Project. Eclipse EGit is the Eclipse open source project that provides Git integration for the Eclipse Platform.
On Eclipse open source project pages (which we often refer to as the Project Management Interface or “PMI”), the “Who’s Involved” pages include some commit activity graphs.
The Contribution Activity chart shows the absolute number of commits made on project repositories over the last twelve months. Eclipse open source projects may have multiple Git repositories; this chart shows commit activity across all branches on all repositories owned by the project team.
The Individual Contribution Activity chart shows the commits attributed to individual developers over the last three months (across all repositories and branches). The identify of the individual committer comes directly from the author field in the Git commit. For project committers, we map author credentials to the information that committers provide in their Eclipse Foundation Account, so–for committers–the name shown here will match what’s in their account, not what’s on the commit record.
Note that any developer listed as an “Also-by” in the commit message will get credit for the commit (“Some Bodyelse”, from the example shown below, would share author credit for the commit). Because of the “Also-by” folks being counted as authors/contributors, some commits may be represented multiple times in the Individual Contribution Activity and Organization Contribution Activity charts (once each for each author).
If you click on a committer’s picture on the “Who’s Involved” page, you’ll see a chart of lifetime contributions to the project. If the chart is missing, that means that the person hasn’t authored any commits.
The Organization Contribution Activity chart shows relative contributions from Eclipse Foundation member companies. Commits made by all project committers affiliated with the company (across all project Git repositories and branches) are grouped together.
On this chart, “Other Committer” groups together contributions from committers who do not work for a member company, and “Contributor” refers to activity by contributors (i.e., developers who are not yet not committers).
Active Member Companies are those Eclipse Foundation member companies that have at least on committer that has made at least one commit on the project in the last three months (note that the order is random).
These charts take a very narrow view of “contribution”. There are many ways to contribute to an open source project. You can answer questions on forums or mailing lists, open and comment on issues, present at conferences, …