On October 20, 2012, I made the first commit to the polish-github-rank project. 14 years ago. The project had a simple goal: to showcase the most interesting Polish open source projects and the people creating them. GitHub was already an important place for Polish developers, but it was much harder to see who in Poland was actually building things in public, who had popular repositories, who was active, and around whom communities were starting to form.
After some time, I abandoned the project. One of the reasons was frequent changes to the GitHub API and to Markdown rendering. Back then, the whole project was written in Markdown. I decided to revive it. The new version is available at: https://polish-open-source.pl/
This time, it is not only about the ranking. The ranking is the starting point, but the mission is broader: I want to reach the best and most engaged Polish open source developers and create a space for them to talk and collaborate. In the new version, under the name Polish Open Source, I also created a Discord server.
Distinguished users from the ranking will get access to it. The idea is for these people to get to know each other, talk, exchange experiences, maybe find co-authors for projects, maybe organize something locally, or simply see who else in Poland is doing interesting things in open source. There are also channels for provincial capital cities.
At the moment, the ranking includes:
- top users and repositories by number of stars,
- top trending users and repositories by star growth,
- top user activity.
You can also generate a badge for your profile or README.
I still have a lot to think through, especially around the ranking itself.
Stars are convenient, but they are not a perfect measure of value. A popular personal repository does not always mean a large real contribution to the ecosystem. On the other hand, someone may regularly make excellent pull requests to important public projects, fix bugs, maintain documentation, help with reviews, and still not have any personal project with thousands of stars.
So in future versions, I would like to identify these people better.
I am especially interested in accepted pull requests to other public projects. They should probably have some kind of weight depending on the popularity of the project, the significance of the change, and its real value. A typo fix in a README should be treated differently from an important bugfix in a widely used library.
For me, Polish Open Source is therefore more than a ranking. It is a map of the Polish open source scene and an attempt to build a community around it.
I do not know yet what will come out of it. Maybe nothing big. But maybe a few people will get to know each other. Maybe new projects will be created. Maybe someone will find maintainers, co-authors, or people facing similar problems. Maybe some small local groups will start to form. Maybe Polish open source will become a little more visible and a little better connected.