[Feature request] "Popular" projects?

[knadh]

This is a really cool project!

I was looking at the India figures and they are astonishing. 14M git pushes. 30M repositories. 12M developers. 450k orgs. In the FOSS communities that we're a part of here in India, a conversation that often comes up is the low number of widely used FOSS projects originating from here. But these numbers are hard to reconcile with that observation (anecdotal, of course) and perhaps indicate a different reality altogether.

It would be great if there was a way to get visibility into "popular" projects from geographies. Stars, forks etc. don't of course directly imply quality, usage, or even popularity, but may serve as an indicator. Perhaps there are other data points that serve as indicators.

Thank you

[mlinksva]

Thanks @knadh! My intuition (could certainly use in depth study) is that these observations are reconcilable:

• It often takes years for an open source project to become widely used (there are counterexamples of course, but usually it's a slow buildup, even for say Linux, which started in 1991).
• India's developer community has been growing rapidly, so I'd expect current cumulative and activity numbers to be higher than the number of widely used projects well known to have originated from India.
• Metrics > originating projects might even be a sign of best practices such as a preference for contributing upstream. It'd be super interesting to find a way to test this.

My guess is that among newer trending projects, the proportion originating from India (or other economy with rapid developer growth, but obviously India is the largest) would be higher than the proportion across all well known projects. Of course this really gets to your feature request: what popular projects are associated with an economy (given that list, it'd be easy to identify which are newer).

Unfortunately, at least for now, I don't see an immediate path to addressing the feature request in this project, which is for aggregate rather than specific (such as identifying specific repositories) metrics. Identifying specific repositories with an economy in the same way we do for aggregate reporting here would have two problems:

• Privacy. It'd be hard (at best, and probably impossible for most repos) to do so without revealing the likely location of developers contributing to a specific repo.
• It might obtain some surprising results for individual repos as developers move, maintainers are added, etc. The perceived "originating from a geography" for a specific repo probably requires some judgment/may be subjective to some extent, vs mode of developers with triage or above access used for aggregate metrics.

One way to collect such repos (which might be seeds for further study) is through a collection like https://github.com/collections/made-in-india or awesome-list style repo like https://github.com/IonicaBizau/made-in-india

Those are just some initial thoughts; I welcome further discussion.