On 2023-01-31 15:57:32 -0800 (-0800), John van Ommen wrote: [...]
In my entire life, I've never seen a technology that's used so widely, but so few people are involved in.
In that case, thanks for volunteering to help!
At this point, I can nearly name all the active OpenStackers in the United States off the top of my head. [...]
Your comment prompted me to review the code contributor statistics I pulled for the 2022 annual report. Of the 966 people whose changes merged to OpenStack projects last year, 92 listed "US" for the location in their foundation profiles. Unfortunately, 407 either had no foundation profile or didn't list a location in theirs, so it's hard to know exact numbers, but "US" was the most common of the 49 countries listed (for those who did list one), and if we were to assume people from all countries are equally likely to list their location then that suggests that "US" code contributors make up approximately 16% of the total, so maybe something like 159 people. Not everyone who contributes to OpenStack does it by writing the software, they're just the easiest subset to measure since we have queryable public records of that activity, so depending on what you mean by "OpenStackers" the number could be a lot higher. The problem underlying commons neglect is not that there are too few people involved in the project, it's that there's too small a proportion of those people who have the interest or time to help maintain the commons. If anything, it gets worse the larger the community becomes. Lots of people go to the beach, but not many people take a trash bag with them and pick up garbage when they see it. The more popular the beach, the harder it becomes to keep it clean. -- Jeremy Stanley