Assessing and remedying low areas of growth

Before we dig into this more, I want to tell all maintainers that it’s perfectly normal to have areas where growth doesn’t hit the targets you are aiming for. Every open source project is a bit different, with different people, priorities, target audiences, industries, and paces of development, and it will tend to be discouraging if you look at your open source project in the same light as something like Node.js or Ruby. Setting goals and metrics is an iterative process, and it is important to re-assess as time progresses to ensure you have the right goals and/or metrics.

Fixing growth issues is quite unique to each specific growth metric. Let’s look at a few metrics that I’ve commonly seen as ones that projects might struggle with and look at some strategies to fix them.

Commits/committers

Projects will often set a metric around the number of commits or committers in a project, which takes various forms...