Through the Builders program (previously MIECO) of Mozilla, I collaborated with Adam Bouhenguel to create an interactive visualization that shows the entire commit history of a GitHub repository. It includes an option to highlight those contributors that have been awarded with ORCA. (The Open Retrospective Compensation Agreement (ORCA), conceived by Adam, is a simple agreement for businesses to share revenue with the open source contributors who make that revenue possible.) This visual is created to work for any GitHub repository and includes documentation on how to prepare the data and load the visual for other repositories than the default of pdf.js.
This visual shows all of the commits made to a certain GitHub repository using the logging command that is built into git. It groups all the commits by month and strings them along a timeline starting at the top and moving down, back in time. This timeline adjusts in width based on the screen size, making sure that it works for both mobile and desktop (or lager) screens. The user can hover over (or click) any commit and see its metadata, as well as all the other commits made by the same user.
This visual is meant to be used to inspect other repositories as well (see for example the d3.js version). At the bottom of the visual/page, in the “Data Details” section you can find the straightforward terminal command to get the required data for any repository (and a link to the R file to clean this data and pour it into the correct format for the visualization), and here is the code and documentation.
Although this visualization is created to highlight the commits made by those contributors tha have been awarded with ORCA, this information is not required and it works perfectly fine without anybody having been assigned with ORCA.
I also created a second visualization for the ORCA release, which shows how the top contributors to any Github repository have also made commits to other repositories and the synergies found there.
