On today’s show Nadia and Mikeal are joined by Andrew Nesbitt and Arfon Smith to talk about open source metrics, and how to interpret data around dependencies and usage. They talked about what we currently can, and can not measure in today’s open source ecosystem. They also talked about individual project metrics, how we can measure success, what maintainers should be paying attention to, and whether or not GitHub stars really matter.

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Featuring:

• Andrew Nesbitt – Website, GitHub, X
• Arfon Smith – Website, GitHub, X
• Nadia Eghbal – GitHub, X
• Mikeal Rogers – GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Andrew Nesbitt is the creator of Libraries.io, and Arfon Smith heads up open source data at GitHub. Andrew’s project, Libraries.io, helps people discover and track open source libraries, which was informed by his work on GitHub Explore. Arfon works to make GitHub data more accessible to the public. Previously, he worked on science initiatives at GitHub and elsewhere, including a popular citizen science platform called Zooniverse.

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