Viewing a project's participants (not just committers/contributors)

[durack1]

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I really like the way that you can view project/repo contributors of a repo, which allows some quantification of contributions outside the repo owners.

We have a repo that is managed by a small number of admins, but collects a lot of information from the community through issues, and once this information is provided, it's committed to the repo by the admins through PRs. The challenge that I was hoping to query, is there anyway of viewing a project's participants, so folks who have contributed to discussions on issues, but haven't made any commits directly to the repo?

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[durack1]

I am still very interested in a technical solution to the above. It would be possible to scour every open and closed issue and open and closed PR and discussion for user handles, but it would be far better if this was done as part of the Insights | Contributors section of a repo, enabling repo admins and the broader public access to such information - this would also aid locating a github handle that is located somewhere in the repo, but could be difficult to locate

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[aradfarahani]

Great! Let's explore the methods in more detail:

1. Manual Tracking

You can manually track participants by reviewing issue comments and discussions. This involves going through each issue and noting down the contributors. While this method is time-consuming, it ensures you capture all contributors accurately.

2. Third-Party Tools

There are several third-party tools and scripts that can help extract and analyze issue comments to identify participants. Some popular tools include:

• GitHub API: You can use GitHub's API to fetch issue comments and contributors programmatically. This requires some coding knowledge but can be automated to save time.
• Tools like Octokit: Octokit is a GitHub API client for JavaScript, which can be used to interact with GitHub's API and fetch data about issue participants.

3. GitHub Discussions

If your repository uses GitHub Discussions, you can view participants in discussions. This feature allows you to see who has been active in discussions, making it easier to identify contributors who haven't made commits.

4. Custom Scripts

You can write custom scripts using GitHub's API to fetch and analyze issue comments. Here's a basic example using Python and the requests library:

import requests

# Replace with your repository details
owner = 'username'
repo = 'repository'

# GitHub API URL for issues
url = f'https://api.github.com/repos/{owner}/{repo}/issues/comments'

# Make a request to the GitHub API
response = requests.get(url)
comments = response.json()

# Extract unique users who commented on issues
participants = set()
for comment in comments:
    participants.add(comment['user']['login'])

# Print the list of participants
print("Participants who commented on issues:")
for participant in participants:
    print(participant)

Steps to Use the Script:

1. Install the requests library:

   pip install requests

2. Run the script:
   • Replace username and repository with your repository details.
   • Execute the script to get a list of participants who commented on issues.

Conclusion

By using these methods, you can identify and acknowledge contributors who have participated in discussions and issues, even if they haven't made direct commits to the repository. This can help you better understand and appreciate the contributions of your community.

[durack1]

@wolfiex this could be useful for repo engagement metrics

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