2025-09-26 –, Auditorium B032 (80)
In this short talk, I look at how data mining of repository activity and mailing lists can give insight to the health of a community project. The talk offers no prescriptions, its purpose is to share techniques that may be useful to the community.
All the interactions of an open source project are publicly visible. This includes commits to repositories, activity on bug trackers and interactions on mailing lists. In this talk I will show how this data can be mined to measure the health of community. Which backends are healthy, and which are languishing, how large are the groups maintaining different parts of the project. We can even start to consider factors such as how inclusive our community is.
Jeremy Bennett is Chief of Executive of Embecosm, a specialist open source consultancy, best known for its work with compiler and AI tool chains. He is author of the standard textbook "Introduction to Compiling Techniques" (McGraw-Hill 1990, 1995, 2003). Jeremy has attended every GNU Tools Cauldron and is a director of the GNU Tools Cauldron Community Interest Company.