Contributions
Contributions are a measurement of how members are giving back to your community. While the word “contribution” can mean a great many things, in Savannah they specificaly mean something one member of your community does that benefits others. This may or may not align with contributions to your product, or contributions that help users of your product.
While you may value different kinds of contributions to your product differently, Savannah treats every contribution as being equal from a community perspective. A support given in your forums might not seem as beneficial to your product as a pull request fixing a bug, the amount of time and effort spent by the contributor is very likely the same, and so their contribution to your community should be treated the same.
What is a Contribution?
Every data source in Savannah determines what activity in that source should be counted as a Contribution. Below is a table showing what each of the built-in sources uses to make that determination.
| Source | Contribution Types |
|---|---|
| Slack | Help given in chat to another member (as suggested by Savannah) |
| Discourse | Posts marked as a Solution using Discourse’s Answers plugin |
| Discord | Help given in chat to another member (as suggested by Savannah) |
| Event | Organising or speaking at an event |
| Github | Pull Request opened |
| Gitlab | Merge Request opened |
| Meetup | Hosted an event |
| Help given in a thread to another member (as suggested by Savannah) | |
| Stack Exchange | Accepted answers to a question |
| Blog | Article written |
| API | Any Contribution type defined when creating a new Contribution |
Contributions by Channel
Like Conversations, Savannah tracks Contributions along with the selected Channel that they were made in. The Contributions by Channel graph will show you which of your channels receive the most contriutions, and changing your view filters will allow you to see which channels get the most contributions based on time spans, Member roles, or content tags.
Contributors
Because you will often want to show your appreciation to your contributors, Savannah makes it easy to see at a glance both those who have recently made their first contribution and those who have made the most contributions within the timeframe you are viewing. You will see the top 10 members for each just below the Contributions graphs. If you have more than 10 members who match the current filter criteria, you will also see a More... link below the list which will take you to the full listing.
Supporters and Enablers
Savannah provides two additional measurements based on contributions, those of supporters and enablers.
A supporter is somebody who has been involved in conversations with the contributor, likely providing them guidance and assistance in the build of to their contribution. Thus the supporting score is the number of such conversations a member has had with somebody who has made a contribution within the selected time frame.
An enabler is somebody who provides support for many contributors, often these are the people who act like a help desk or concierge, directing many people towards making their contributions. The enabler score is the number of contributors that a member has had any conversations with in the lead of to their contribution.