Boosting Your Open Source Project with Contributor Confidence

Imagine you’re the maintainer of a thriving open source project. You’ve put countless hours into building and growing this repository. You see stars and forks growing, but you can’t help but wonder: how many of these users will actually return to contribute?

This question sparked the creation of Contributor Confidence.

Here's how it works: The metric analyzes users who star or fork a repository, checks if they've contributed to other projects recently, and most critically, if they come back to contribute to the project they starred or forked within 30 days.

Understanding Contributor Confidence

Valibot

With it's launch almost a year ago, Valibot has gained some quick traction, with 5.5k stars and 183 forks. Not only are people starring and forking the repository, but they're contributing as well - with 210 contributors in the last year - which is reflected in their Contributor Confidence metric.

If you want to learn more about Valibot, check out Nick Taylor's latest post.

Zod

Zod’s story is a bit different. Despite its high number of stars (8394) and forks (411) over the last year, its Contributor Confidence score is lower. This indicates that while many users are interested in Zod, fewer are returning to make meaningful contributions - only 185.

Weighting the Score

• Forks: Forking a repository usually indicates a stronger intent to contribute compared to just starring it. Because of that, forks are weighted more heavily in the confidence score.
• Direct Contributions: If a user makes a direct contribution to the repository, their confidence score for that specific repository is 100%, reflecting the highest weight.

Why it Matters

For maintainers, Contributor Confidence contextualizes new stars and forks based on the likelihood of active contributions, helping gauge community engagement.

We encourage you to check your project's Contributor Confidence score and let us know how you interpret and act on these insights.