Measuring the local GitHub developer community

TL;DR

This paper explores how creating regional rankings of GitHub developers in Spain can enhance community engagement and productivity by analyzing local developer communities' structure and activity.

Contribution

It introduces a methodology for identifying and analyzing local developer communities on GitHub based on geographic data, demonstrating its impact on community building.

Findings

Regional rankings increase community engagement

Local communities differ in structure and productivity

Methodology effectively identifies geographically concentrated developers

Abstract

Creating rankings might seem like a vain exercise in belly-button gazing, even more so for people so unlike that kind of things as programmers. However, in this paper we will try to prove how creating city (or province) based rankings in Spain has led to all kind of interesting effects, including increased productivity and community building. We describe the methodology we have used to search for programmers residing in a particular province focusing on those where most population is concentrated and apply different measures to show how these communities differ in structure, number and productivity.