Contributor Funnel Model (V2)

ContributorFunnelModel.md

Metrics Model: New Contributor Funnel

Why You Should Care

As a community manager on a project that wants to increase the number of contributors, I want to know where new contributors are dropping out. I need:

• To know how I am doing as a whole
• To track how well I am doing at each stage
• To identify the most impactful places to improve

Metrics in the Metrics Model

• New Contributors
  • Overall success rate. A blend of all the detail-level metrics.
• Clones
  • Popularity (like downloads, stars, and clones) shows how many potential contributors are using the project2
• Issue Response Time and Issue Age
  • Slow response time discourages new contributors
• Bus Factor
  • More-widely distributed work reflects contributor growth
• Review Cycle Duration within a Change Request, Change Request Acceptance Ratio, Change Requests Duration
  • Ease of getting a change request accepted influences whether contributors stick around for subsequent work

Design Guidance

The metrics fall into different categories and distinct places in a workflow.

First, the overall rate of contributor growth is measured. This enables the user to understand the baseline health of contributor growth.

Second, the success or failure of new contributors moving through each stage of the process - from user to bug reporter to contributor - is measured.

Last, factors that influence the success rate for each stage are measured.

References

https://gist.github.com/lucasgonze/343a8eb31644a0eb47f94b10a1635f5d

Contributors to Model

• Lucas Gonze

Coverage

I wasn't able to find metrics on some types of contributions:

• Creating an issue or a substantive comment
• Improving documentation
• Triaging issues

Types of Contributions covers those, but only in a very general way.

Love this!

Sean Goggins says the last two are not currently done, but the first one might exist. He'll research.

Looking good!

From evolution Issue-new.md is probably the appropriate metric for the first.

There are a few documentation metrics in DEI that may fit here.

I am not sure what a triaging metric is. Could you provide information on this? What do you want to measure?

Looking good!

From evolution Issue-new.md is probably the appropriate metric for the first.

There are a few documentation metrics in DEI that may fit here.

I am not sure what a triaging metric is. Could you provide information on this? What do you want to measure?

Kevin, thanks for this.

What I mean by triaging is program management work. Cleaning up, replying to, closing, adding labels, creating boards - that kind of thing.

I'm looking in the evolution WG metrics and haven't found the exact one. Can you help me locate it?

Cool! Thanks!
At that high level, I think a triage metric may be very difficult to define. I am wondering if the issue response metric already covers this or at least part of it (maybe minus the cleaning up and creating boards bit).