oss-pulse

📖 Methodology

How OSS Pulse collects data and calculates metrics

Data Collection

What We Track

OSS Pulse tracks GitHub’s most influential repositories - not a random sample, but the elite of open source. We focus on repositories that have proven impact and community engagement.

Selection Criteria

Our daily collection pulls repositories matching these criteria:

Query	Sort By	Purpose
`stars:>1`	Stars	Most starred repositories
`forks:>500`	Forks	Highly forked projects (active development)
`help-wanted-issues:>0`	Help Wanted	Community-driven projects seeking contributors
`watchers:>100`	Default	Well-watched repositories
`topic:ai`	Default	Trending AI/ML projects

Freshness Filter

All repositories must have been pushed within the last 2 years to be included. This ensures we track active, maintained projects.

Collection Process

Source: GitHub Search API
Frequency: Daily at 00:00 UTC
Deduplication: Repositories appearing in multiple queries are counted once
History: 250+ days of daily snapshots for trend analysis

Health Score Calculation

Our health score is inspired by the CHAOSS Project (Community Health Analytics for Open Source Software), a Linux Foundation initiative.

Dimensions

Dimension	Weight	Calculation
Activity	30%	Based on days since last push. Daily push = 100, >1 year = 5
Popularity	20%	Stars per day since creation, logarithmically scaled
Engagement	20%	Fork-to-star ratio. >30% = 100, <2% = 10
Issues	15%	Open issues per 1,000 stars. <1 = 100, >50 = 10
Quality	15%	License (+40), description (+25), topics (+20), homepage (+15)

Penalties

Archived: -70% (score × 0.3)
Disabled: -90% (score × 0.1)
No License: -15% (score × 0.85)

Grade Scale

Grade	Score Range
A+	95-100
A	90-94
A-	85-89
B+	80-84
B	75-79
B-	70-74
C+	65-69
C	60-64
C-	55-59
D+	50-54
D	45-49
D-	40-44
F	0-39

Growth Pattern Classification

Pattern	Criteria
🚀 Viral	>500 stars/week OR >5x baseline daily average
⚡ Fast	>100 stars/week sustained
📈 Moderate	20-100 stars/week
🐢 Slow	3-20 stars/week
⏸️ Stable	<3 stars/week change
📉 Declining	Negative weekly growth

Viral Spike Detection

A viral spike is detected when:

Daily star gain exceeds 5× the 14-day rolling average
The spike occurs within the last 7 days
Absolute gain is significant (>100 stars)

Organization Rankings

Organizations are ranked by:

Total Stars: Sum of all repository stars
Repo Count: Number of repos in our dataset
Average Health: Mean health score across all repos

Language Analysis

Languages are determined by GitHub’s primary language detection for each repository.

Limitations

Data reflects public repositories only
Star counts may include bot/fake stars (we don’t filter these)
Health scores are heuristic, not definitive quality measures
Historical data limited to our collection period

References

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