How to gain insight into your project contributors

We’re excited to share with you the contributors Action! At GitHub, we maintain several open source repositories and have developed this Action to empower maintainers to measure how many new and returning contributors and contributions have occurred over any given time period.

ZK

Zack KoppertGitHub

·October 23, 2023·Maintainers

How to gain insight into your project contributors

A new way to measure contributor activity

GitHub has released the Contributors GitHub Action, a tool designed to help maintainers and organizations track engagement across a project or an entire organization. The Action surfaces data that can be used to spot potential new maintainers, acknowledge both new and returning contributors, and gauge whether a project is gaining or losing participation.

The intended use cases include giving maintainers a signal when contributor numbers are trending up or down, and helping Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) or foundations determine when a project might need extra support.

What the Action tracks

The Contributors Action can be scoped to a single repository or an entire GitHub organization. The metrics it gathers include:

Total number of contributors.
Total number of contributions made.
The percentage of new contributors.
Per-contributor activity, including commit counts.
Whether contributors can be sponsored via GitHub Sponsors.

A notable constraint is that the Action only works with information already public on a user's profile or in a repository's commit history, so no additional privacy exposure is introduced by running it.

Setting up the Action

To implement the Contributors Action, you can follow these steps:

Pick a host repository. You can use a new or existing repository to host the Action. It can also be run against an entire organization rather than just a single repo.
Select an example workflow. The examples in the Action's README provide a starting point, with customization options documented in the Configuration section.
Copy and edit the workflow. Place your chosen workflow in the .github/workflows/ directory with a .yml extension, then adjust parameters such as the target organization or repository, start and end dates, and any other configuration options.
Configure the token. The Action needs a GitHub token with read access to the repository or organization you want to scan. If the Action runs against a different repository or organization, create a GitHub API token, save it as a repository secret, and reference that secret in the workflow.
Commit and run. Merge the workflow file into the default branch. The Action is designed to run on a schedule, but can also be triggered manually with a workflow_dispatch event.