---
layout: post
title: "Measuring Activity in Open-Source Projects using Github Network Graph"
redirect_from: "/measuring-activity-in-open-source-projects-using-github-network-graph/"
date: 2011-12-12 02:05:57
tags: [github, open source]
comments: true
dblog_post_id: 302
---
When choosing to use an open source project you might want to know whether it's still developed or at least maintained. For Ruby projects I used to check Rubygems release dates. Here's [Grape's](https://rubygems.org/gems/grape).

![]({{ site.url }}/images/posts/2011/2011-12-12-measuring-activity-in-open-source-projects-using-github-network-graph/image_19.jpg)

Nothing for the last six months? Not very good – there hasn't been a release for a while, but that's more a tribute to the stability of the project.

You could check the number of forks and watchers for projects on Github.

![]({{ site.url }}/images/posts/2011/2011-12-12-measuring-activity-in-open-source-projects-using-github-network-graph/image_7.jpg)

It measures the project's popularity quite well, but maybe not its activity.

My favorite way of measuring a project's activity is to look at the Github network graph. It's an [amazing and useful feature](https://github.com/blog/39-say-hello-to-the-network-graph-visualizer). Here's [Grape's](https://github.com/ruby-grape/grape/network).

![]({{ site.url }}/images/posts/2011/2011-12-12-measuring-activity-in-open-source-projects-using-github-network-graph/image_13.jpg)

The project is clearly happening. But you can see how this is all over the place – that's a typical picture for open-source efforts: few core and relatively irregular contributors, long branches and abandoned ends for feature attempts that don't get merged.

When a small group of people truly collaborates, their feature branches make it into master most of the time. They are also constantly picking up commits from the source. What does a really dense collaborative project look like? Here's a picture from one of our private repositories. If yours looks like this, you got a team!

![]({{ site.url }}/images/posts/2011/2011-12-12-measuring-activity-in-open-source-projects-using-github-network-graph/image_18.jpg)

Maybe someone can use this idea to build a nice feature to measure a Github _project density_?