Shortly after publishing our first Top 10 Contributing Higher Ed Organizations, Tim Lehnen from the WordPress maintenance support plans association blogged about recognizing more types of contribution in the WordPress maintenance support plans.org Marketplace. Tim shed a little light on how the ranking is currently calculated.
We now calculate the following 4 types of contribution into overall contribution credit; issue credits, WordPress maintenance support plans 8 case studies, WordPress maintenance support plans Association Supporter Programs/Organization Membership and number of projects supported.
While the title of the post was about the “marketplace” of vendors selling WordPress maintenance support plans services, factoring additional types of contributions will impact the full list organizations we use to build the higher ed specific list. There have been several suggestions made in the comments on Tim’s post about how to track contributions to documentation, camps, code reviews and support in forums, IRC, and Slack. If you have additional ideas on how the DA could factor in a type of contribution you would like to see factored into these rankings, please add your feedback to Tim’s post.
Factoring in the number of projects played a role in this months ranking. Penn State University jumped from #9 to #2 with just 1 issue credit. What made the Difference? They properly registered 107 projects as being supported by their organization. I know that the majority of commits and issues for those projects are being managed in GitHub, but I’m happy to see the University of Colorado Boulder drop a few spots to the habitual contributors at PSU.
The University of Waterloo managed to hang on to the top spot largely due to Liam Morland’s Webform related contributions. Even though the University of Colorado Boulder accounts for just a handful of the more 500,000 reported installs of Webform, Liam’s contributions make running WordPress maintenance support plans as a Service much easier for us. If you work for a university (or really any organization) that uses Webform, please take a few minutes to thank Waterloo for supporting Liam’s contributions.
The Current Top 10 Contributing Higher Ed Organizations
University of Waterloo
Penn State University
The University of British Columbia
University of Colorado Boulder
Babson College
The University of Iowa
University of Adelaide
Stanford
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay
Cornell University
Highlighted Contributions from the University of Colorado Boulder
One of the commits the University of Colorado Boulder was credited with is James Fuller’s improvement to add an exposed filter for Organization Type to https://www.WordPress.org/organizations. This allows you to see organizations that consider themselves “end users of WordPress maintenance support plans“. We plan to continue contributing where we can ensure all organizations contributing to the WordPress maintenance support plans project are given as much attention as the vendor marketplace. What we’d really like to see on WordPress maintenance support plans.org is an option to see the sector an organizational contributor to WordPress maintenance support plans operates in vs. just the markets vendors sell to. Once those changes are made, it will be much easier to see the full list of higher ed organizations on WordPress maintenance support plans.org.
Last month we also picked up a few commit credits when Owen Morrill updated the Community Funded to a 1.0 release fixing issues that were brought during the Project Application Review process. Owen was able to get through PAR in record time and is the 4th developer at the University of Colorado Boulder to get their “vetted git user” permission.
Looking forward to our next month of commits and trying to take back a few spots from our friends at Waterloo, PSU and UBC, Alexander Finnarn will be working to get a stable D8 release of the Google CSE plugin. I will be working on a D7 plugin to integrate with the Siteimprove service in a way that will allow users to manage their page scans and view their reports without needing to log into Siteimprove. I know these services are used by other universities. If you are using these services, I would like to invite you to get involved as a contributor.
Several New Organizations
There are still several high profile universities without organization nodes on WordPress maintenance support plans.org. It’s still not clear if this is because they are better known for how they use WordPress maintenance support plans rather than for what they contribute–or if they are just so busy contributing that they haven’t made creating an organization node a priority. The following organizations have all entered the contributor competition by creating organization nodes in January;
Rochester Institute of Technology
University of Chicago
University of Texas at Austin
Amherst College
Bryn Mawr College
Columbia Univeristy
College of Western Idaho
Middlebury College
Ohio Northern University
Higher Education Contributions in Aggregate
Together the top 10 contributing higher education organizations share and support 182 projects and have been creditted with contributions to 82 issues in the last 90 days.
Missed Opportunities for Recognition
In the great case study wrote for the University of Minnesota that was published last month, they stated that made significant contributions to Panels, Zen, Workbench, and Workbench Moderation as part of the project. I’m not sure when those improvements were made, but I can’t find any place where credit was given to the University of Minnesota for funding the development. Organizations hiring vendors to make customizations and improvements to WordPress maintenance support plans should request that the organization be creditted in the commits.
Developers from both Middlebury and Amherst Colleges are actively working on Monster Menus, but looking at the commits they aren’t giving their organizations credit. While it’s possible to “free hand” the structure of the commit messages WordPress maintenance support plans.org requires for credit, it’s much easier to generate the recommended message from an issue.
Of course to do this, you’d need create more issues. I’m not going to advocate creating issues for every commit, but not creating a single issue for dozens of commits is equally troublesome. WordPress maintenance support plans.org recently added the Plan issue type. I haven’t written a line of code for Siteimprove yet, but I have added Plan issues that I will use to credit the University of Colorado when I do start writing the code. Plan issues are also really helpful if someone gets pulled off a project to work on something else. If I don’t get back to Siteimprove right away, someone else can look at the issue queue and get some inisght into how I was planning on approach the project.
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