Visualizing an Open Source Community

What does an open source community look like? How many people contribute and what gets downloaded? Oliver Ratzesberger created some vizes to better understand the Joomla open source community on Kunena.

Ellie Fields

What does an open source community look like? How many people contribute and what gets downloaded? Oliver Ratzesberger created some vizes to better understand the Joomla open source community on Kunena.

His first viz shows that more than 700 users contributed to more than 700 projects in 2009:

From Oliver:

Here are a few examples I put together with Tableau Public based on Joomla data that the community kindly made available. It is the first time that they have seen their own data like that. And while these charts are very simple (I did them in a few hours on Friday) they left quite an impression. The charts are embedded into our forum software 'Kunena' (swahili for 'to speak').

This next viz looks at the other side of an open source community: downloads. The top project, jpack, had more than 250,000 downloads in Q3 of 2010.

See Oliver's Kuena forum posts (here and here) for more visualizations and discussion.