Shortly after the ownCloud 7 release we made statistics available showing the healthy growth of the ownCloud community. This is important for contributors, users and customers in choosing a project to work with. Numbers say something about the health and relative size of a community. We now announce the availability of regular and up-to-date community numbers on ownCloud provided by Bitergia.
ownCloud statistics
Statistics help evaluate the impact of events like the ownCloud Contributor Conference we held last August. Two months later, we can see on the ownCloud dashboard that we reached a peak of 100 contributors in August and 93 in September. The previous record was 85 in March 2014 and before that, 79 in March 2012. And the number of people closing bug reports peaked with 136 over the previous peak of 105 in January of this year, showing the conference did result in a lot of activity.
The numbers also raise the question: what is it about March that the number of contributors peaked in the last two years?
Digging deeper on Bitergia
The Bitergia web interface offers more than overview graphs, showing for example activity split out over the various repositories. This teaches us the most active repositories are Core, Mirall (our desktop client) and the apps repo. But in the apps repository, activity seems to have gone down considerably over the last year.
Interpretation is important: since the beginning of 2014, we’ve worked hard to move apps into their own repositories, which makes it easier to contribute to them. Of course, these apps then take their issues with them – decreasing activity in the ‘catch-all’ apps repository but growing activity overall. We now have 60 active repositories under our github account!
Another example is found in the mailing lists. An overview can be found on this page. Digging deeper, you notice that the user- and developer mailing lists seemingly have started on January 2014. This is of course not exactly true – but the user- and developer lists were separated that date and the ‘old’ list is not part of the statistics so there is a sudden, large increase in activity.
There is more data on Bitergia, including the attraction/retention rate study. If you’re interested in statistics and the health of communities, it provides a good look at where ownCloud is standing and perhaps going. Of course, if you’re more interested in becoming part of the crew, check out our contribute page!
