An occasional series attempting to measure the size of the Django community.
Anyone who works in open source knows that it’s basically impossible to know the size of any open source community. It’s easier with commercial programs — just look at the sales numbers — but since F/OSS is freely (and widely) available, there’s almost no way to know how many people are using your project.
I find it best to think of Django in terms of concentric circles of community members from casual users down to the small group of committers. Most open source projects — Django included — operate very much as a meritocracy: prove yourself at the user level and you’ll gradually become a trusted developer; prove yourself as a developer and you’ll develop an increasingly powerful voice within the community.
These groups break down roughly like the following:
- Users — everyone who’s used Django.
- Community — anyone who participates in the Django community process.
- Contributors — those who’ve actually contributed code, documentation, or anything else to Django.
- Committers — trusted community members who’ve been granted the commit bit.
Entries in this series:
-
Circles of Django (2007)
So here’s a question I get asked a lot: “How big is Django’s community?” Read on to see me fail to answer this question.
-
The Django community in 2009
In March of 2007, I attempted to measure the size of Django’s community. That March turned out to be a major inflection point in Django’s growth: the release of 0.96 brought a lot of new features — testing and the new forms library being the critical ones — and those in turn brought in a lot of new users. Growth since then has been at a much faster pace. Today I thought it’d be interesting to review the same metrics I used back then. I was quite curious to see what’s changed, and by how much.
-
The Django community in 2012
In 2007, and again in 2009, I made an attempt to measure the size of the Django community. By popular request — okay, a couple people asked for it, whatever — let’s do this thing again.