What Can Open Source Project Health Metrics Reveal About Project Users?
summary
Researchers compare Flutter's monthly active users (Jan 2018–Feb 2021) against public proxies and find strong linear relationships using GrimoireLab and Sorting Hat to collect GitHub, Stack Overflow and Slack data, excluding Google employees. R² and correlation tests exceed ~0.7–0.8 for most metrics; cumulative forks give the most consistent slope-based forecasts of active users. Dataset excludes downloads and web analytics (behind Google), so results are promising but limited to available public signals.
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chapters (6)
- 0:00Open source health metrics intro
- 2:46Why metrics matter for users
- 8:01Proxy metrics for users
- 10:06Flutter usage case study
- 18:49Research findings & questions
- 21:37Q&A
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