Wer gibt wieviel #OpenSource frei? The winners are @camptocamp @Scout24 & @puzzleitc! Die neue @Github Pyramide von Schweizer (IT)-Unternehmen und Behörden: Eine deskriptive Statistik der eigenössischen Open Source *Hack*-Ordnung ;) -> Gibt es noch weitere CH #OpenSource Heros? pic.twitter.com/Szvruq0bL5

— Matthias Stürmer (@maemst) September 16, 2019

With this tweet, a lot of discussion was fired up in our community about how we track source publications, quantity vs. quality, and responsibility. This was not (yet) part of an empirical study, and we'd need to start "from scratch" to make progress here, but the tweets have proven the interest in such a map.

The pyramid shown above is inspired by the famous Gartner Magic Quadrants or mapping efforts like Swiss Startups dot org, and has the OSS Directory and the popular code sharing platform GitHub as its source.

This challenge was originally proposed at DINAcon 2019. See the 2022 update of the challenge:

{ hacknight challenges }

Use the Swiss companies and administrations on GitHub image shared by @maemst as a starting point to discover the range and breadth of the open source community. Does it correlate to what you hear and see at DINAcon? Are any important institutions missing? Explore the accounts and repositories, look at their statistics, and collect some ideas of how this kind of data could be used.

A community run list would widen the scope of the project and more people could be involved in tracking the situation. An awesome list would be a really easy way to get this going - while a Data Package would be more versatile, and an excellent way to invite contributions while easily maintaining this data in a structured way. So, be an Open Source Hero and make one!

Run the data we have collected through your favorite open source dataviz tool and see if you could add some compelling criteria for it, such as cumulative stars or commits. And for the pro challenge: start a systematic, automated, process to track the contributions of companies and individuals. Ideas on how this could work can be for example found in the Dribdat2 Technical Report, from a recent academic project in our community.