Stargazers
“The popularity of a repository is measured by its number of stargazers... It is not yet clear to us whether it is the project’s popularity that attracts contributors or, vice-versa… (but) the large number of contributors results in good and, consequently, popular projects.”
(Computer Science Social Informatics, 2014)
% Of Issues Closed
This metric is a good measure of community support.I used api issue metrics and calculated the percentage of total repo issues that have been closed as an indicator of community support. A paper in the journal CS Social Informatics states “We believe that issue survival is one of the indicators of GitHub team quality. Our assumption is, that well organized and motivated teams tend to maintain and swiftly close issues associated with their repositories, and measuring the time of issue closure, together with other predictor variables describing GitHub repositories, is a good metric of quality for the team maintaining a given repository.”
(CCSI, 2014)
Forks
Forks are a good measure of development activity.Fast Company identifies stars, forks and push events as all relevant in identifying trending projects saying “GitHub’s Explore section shows trending repositories based on forks and stars … We used a rather unscientific combination of... forks and push events….” (fastcompany.com, 2013) Commits were my first choice to measure development activity but I was unable to fetch a live api metric for commits and so used forks.