Contributor Role Persona

The initiation of open source projects is usually carried out by a team or an individual, initiating and establishing in their personal or organizational capacity. In the evolutionary process, new individuals or organizations are continuously brought in to make contributions. Whether they are initiators or later joiners, through establishing mutually beneficial cooperation with the community and making prominent and sustained contributions, they gain roles of community managers. This role can usually be demonstrated by performing certain management actions on code hosting platforms. We also use this type of event behaviors to identify whether contributors have a managerial role. Contributors who are not perceived to have managing behaviors are called Participants.

We use the term Managers to describe contributors in the community who have management privileges. Typically, they are also technical leaders of the projects. However, technical leadership does not necessarily equate to management actions, so we use the more specific term "manager" for clarity.

Determining whether a contributor is a manager is based on whether they have made contributions in issue management or code management categories. Of course, a contributor may not be a manager when initially participating in community contributions, so we introduce timestamps to mark the change in this role. In the two contribution categories mentioned above, if contributors declare their organizational identities, such as by forcefully submitting code through a public organizational email, we refer to them as organizational managers; otherwise, they are considered individual managers.

• Managers:
  • Organizational Managers
  • Individual Managers
• Participants:
  • Organizational Participants
  • Individual Participants

Metrics in the Metrics Model

Organizational Contributor Count

• Definition: How many active organizational contributors in the last 90 days.
• Weight: 20%
• Threshold: 1500

Organizational Contribution Count

• Definition: The number of contributions per capita for contributors in the active organizational in the last 90 days.
• Weight: 30%
• Threshold: 10

Individual Contributor Count

• Definition: How many active individual contributors in the last 90 days.
• Weight: 20%
• Threshold: 3500

Individual Contribution Count

• Definition: The number of contributions per capita for contributors in the active individual in the last 90 days.
• Weight: 30%
• Threshold: 5

Metric Model Algorithm

Weight

We use AHP to calculate weight of each metric.

AHP Input Data

Metric Name	Organizational Contributor Count	Organizational Contribution Count	Individual Contributor Count	Individual Contribution Count
Organizational Contributor Count	1.000	0.667	1.000	0.667
Organizational Contribution Count	1.500	1.000	1.500	1.000
Individual Contributor Count	1.000	0.667	1.000	0.667
Individual Contribution Count	1.500	1.000	1.500	1.000

AHP Analysis Result

Metrics Name	Eigenvector	Weight
Organizational Contributor Count	0.800	20.000%
Organizational Contribution Count	1.200	30.000%
Individual Contributor Count	0.800	20.000%
Individual Contribution Count	1.200	30.000%

Consistency Test Results

Largest Eigenvalue	CI Value	RI Value	CR Value	Consistency Test
4.000	0.000	0.890	0.000	PASS

Threshold

The threshold we chose is based on the big-data observations from different types of open source projects.

References

• Reflections on the Evaluation and Measurement of Open Source Ecosystem (1) — Evolution and Trends
• Reflections on the Evaluation and Measurement of Open Source Ecosystem (2) - The Multidimensional Space of Evaluation Systems
• Reflections on the Evaluation and Measurement of Open Source Ecosystem (3) - Dynamics and Statics of Contributors

Contributors

Frontend

• Shengxiang Zhang
• Feng Zhong
• Xingyou Lai

Backend

• Yehui Wang
• Shengxiang Zhang
• Shengbao Li
• Huatian Qin

Metric Model

• Yehui Wang
• Liang Wang
• Shengbao Li