[new media, socjust] Fwd: "Acknowledging Non-Coding Contributions"

[siderea]

Over at Model View Culture, a tremendous piece that challenges Open Source projects to recognize just how much is contributed by just how many people in ways other than coding (all emphasis mine): The GitHub API and Archives hold tremendous amounts of data that their user interface takes no advantage of. We can use this information to create our own profiles of our projects. [...] Using this software [octohatrack], we can see that for a project with a moderately large user base, the amount of total contributors is often orders of magnitude greater than the core code contributors, which goes to show the amount of hidden work that goes unrecognised. For example, popular JavaScript based slideshow software reveal.js is hosted on GitHub. The banner at the top of the list of files boasts 160 contributors. If you click on this link, you only see 100 named contributors, which is GitHub’s limit for the Contribution Graph. However, using octohatrack, you can see that there are over 1,200 contributors to the project, both code and non-code. Someone might be on this list for doing something as small as a “+1” to a suggestion, or something as big as helping debug a complex issue; but if they don’t commit any code into the solution, GitHub doesn’t count them as a contributor. In this case, there is nearly a ten-fold increase in contributors compared to what’s being reported.
Read the whole thing: Acknowledging Non-Coding Contributions. Recommended.