What counts, and
what doesn’t.

The five parts

1,000 points available, distributed on purpose

• Upstream

  420 pts

  Pull requests you opened that were merged into repositories owned by neither you nor any org you publicly belong to. Someone with commit rights read your work and chose to take it. This is the number the board is really about.

• Reach

  220 pts

  Stars across the projects you maintain. It measures how many people found your own work worth keeping — real, but easy to win once and coast on, so it sits well below Upstream.

• Breadth

  180 pts

  How many distinct owners have merged your patches. Landing fifty patches in one repo shows commitment; landing fifty across twenty repos shows you can walk into an unfamiliar codebase and be useful.

• Standing

  90 pts

  Followers on GitHub. A weak proxy for reputation, deliberately capped low so popularity can't buy a tier.

• Current

  90 pts

  Contribution activity over the last 90 days. Enough to separate active contributors from dormant ones, not enough to punish anyone who took a season off.

Why nothing scales linearly

Each part runs through a saturating curve rather than a straight line. The distance between zero and fifty upstream patches is a career change; the distance between five hundred and five hundred fifty is noise. A linear score would say those gaps are equal, so the curve says otherwise.

score = Σ weight × (1 − e^(−value / k))

The ladder

Tier names are borrowed from the roles real projects give their own people, rather than invented metals.

• First patch0+ impact
• Contributor200+ impact
• Committer400+ impact
• Maintainer600+ impact
• Core780+ impact

Where this is wrong

Every ranking encodes a bias. These are the ones known about:

• −Private org membership is invisible

  Home teams are detected from public org membership. Someone who works on a project without publicly joining its org gets credited as an outside contributor, which overstates them.

• −Breadth is a floor, not a total

  Only the 100 most recent upstream patches are readable without an account, so anyone prolific has touched more owners than the board can see.

• −Pull requests aren't the only contribution

  Review, triage, documentation, maintainership, and mailing-list patches are real work and none of it appears here. A reviewer who never opens a PR scores zero.

• −Reach rewards timing

  Stars accumulate on whatever got popular. An early, lucky project outranks better work published later.