tracking non-commit GitHub actions

[cranmer]

I've just learned about this interesting tool. I was looking for something to help with a different project. Instead of looking at the activity around a particular open source project, I wanted to track the activity of a cohort of GitHub users. In particular, those that attend some sort of training like Software Carpentry or other university-run training in good software practices. We would like to know if these training efforts are useful, and one way of measuring that success is to track the student's activity levels on GitHub over time. Do they continue using GitHub for their projects? Do they contribute to others? etc.

I see that bigbang can deal with commits on GitHub and email conversations, but it's not clear to me yet from your documentation if bigbang tracks other kinds of activities on GitHub, like posting issues or comments (on any repository). I'm also not sure if the GitHub API allows for this. For instance, if you knew only my username, would you be able to find this issue?

If bigbang does support this, maybe it can be called out in the documentation a bit more clearly. If not, consider this a feature request.

[sbenthall]

It doesn't yet work with those data sources but yes that's a great feature.

[sbenthall]

One application of this feature would be to help informed BigBang's own governance process. It's been suggested that issue tracker activity should counted as a participation metric for determining membership of the Steering Committee.

http://lists.ghserv.net/pipermail/bigbang-dev/2016-October/000042.html

See also:

https://github.com/datactive/bigbang/wiki/Governance

[sbenthall]

See #504