Record/report trends

[david-a-wheeler]

Report on trends for FLOSS overall, in addition to identifying "projects that most need help". This would be of interest to a lot of people who aren't FLOSS developers.

This is a completely new purpose, but a lot of the work we're already doing gets us close to it. After all, we already use a program to gather quantitative data about projects, and then calculate a score for each project. We'd need to re-run the program periodically to see trends (say weekly, monthly, or quarterly), but that's very doable. We'd also need to use a much larger set of programs (currently we focus on "concerning" ones), but we intended to broaden the set of projects anyway. I imagine we'd like to review that every 6 months, but I think we should re-run much more often (weekly?) to show that the trends really are trends.

It may be easier to see trends if we break software into categories. Are there categories that we could identify a priori that might be useful? We could also try to automatically determine categories from the data, but that only works if we collect the data that would help divide the software into reasonable categories :-).