Visualizing Drupal Community through drupal.org
Drupal is one of the largest communities in the open source world today. It is sometimes difficult to imagine the scale and reach of this community unaided. Visualizations are a great tool that can visually and interactively convey the data and what it means.
It is a safe assumption to say that almost everyone in the vast Drupal community is present on drupal.org, which makes it a primary source for data on Drupal community. This data when viewed through meaningful dimensions has a lot to tell not just about the current state of affairs but what the community might look like in a few years. This is precisely what I have attempted to show using drustats.com - a visualization tool for data collected through drupal.org.
In this session, I will cover more visualizations that could help us understand:
- Users and contributors (documentation, code, etc…) in numbers
- Geographic reach of the Drupal community
- Trend of various contributions to drupal.org content and projects
- Contributions to drupal.org split geographically and by other factors
- And more
I also hope to discuss what data should we be collecting and how to portray contributions to the community and how to use the data to reward contributors and encourage contributions. At the end of the session, we would leave with:
- Facts and figures for Drupal community from drupal.org
- Food for thought on what the Drupal community might look like in a few years
- Discussions and ideas on what to focus to encourage new contributors (code and non-code) and expand reach