New sources for contributors.debian.org

Many people might not be aware of it, but since a couple of years ago, we have an excellent tool for tracking and recognising contributors to the Debian Project: Debian Contributors

Debian is a big project, and there are many people working that do not have great visibility, specially if they are not DDs or DMs. We are all volunteers, so it is very important that everybody gets credited for their work. No matter how small or unimportant they might think their work is, we need to recognise it!

One great feature of the system is that anybody can sign up to provide a new data source. If you have a way to create a list of people that is helping in your project, you can give them credit!

If you open the Contributors main page, you will get a list of all the groups with recent activity, and the people credited for their work. The data sources page gives information about each data source and who administers it.

For example, my Contributors page shows the many ways in which the system recognises me, all the way back to 2004! That includes commits to different projects, bug reports, and package uploads.

I have been maintaining a few of the data sources that track commits to Git and Subversion repositories:

The last two are a bit problematic, as they group together all commits to the respective VCS repositories without distinguishing to which sub-projects the contributions were made.

The Go and Perl groups' contributions are already extracted from that big pile of data, but it would be much nicer if each substantial packaging team had their own data source. Sadly, my time is limited, so this is were you come into the picture!

If you are a member of a team, and want to help with this effort, adopt a new data source. You can be providing commit logs, but it is not limited to that; think of translators, event volunteers, BSP attendants, etc.

The initial work is very small, and there is almost no maintenance. There is information on how to contribute here and here, but I would be more than happy to guide you if you contact me.