Patchwork events are casual, mentored workshops for beginners to Git and GitHub, hosted by GitHub all over the world.
Patchwork events are informal physical gatherings, which goal is to help people onboard or improve their skills using Git and GitHub. A Patchwork event is typically a short moment at a given place and time. A storm of information, knowledge, experience is exchanged between participants during this spatio-temporal special moment.
Here, we ask two things:
- How many new GitHub users sign-up during before, during, and after a Patchwork event?
- What is the short-, mid- and long-term engagement patterns following a Patchwork event?
Behind the scene, a team at GitHub is working hard shaping and promoting Patchwork events. Because these events occur all over the world, across cultures, one shall not expect a one-size-fits-all format, but rather some tailored solutions. The Patchwork Analytics Project aims at delivering analytics and forecasting models for Patchwork.
In turn, these analytics and forecasting models will help the Patchwork team react quickly and tune the format in a way that increases the chances that a future Patchwork event will maximize engagement.
More hackathons and meetups gather communities for short special moments. These moments are expected to turn into some concrete achievements in the future, may it be a piece of code, a website to organize a local community, etc. Once people have split again, and went back to their business as usual, collaboration continues, most often online. GitHub, and many other online collaboration platforms, help communities keep ongoing their work.
In the future, the tools developed in this project, shall help community managers and meetup organizers keep an eye on the long-term positive effects of the gatherings they organize.
Still early phase, more will be added soon.
After the Patchwork events have started, we observe that the activity of the Patchwork community has increased faster than before (note that before Patchwork events started there was not Patchwork community, so it is unclear what this activity was before, but here a ceteris paribus approach is taken)
All code and calculations are reported in the Patchwork Notebook