[eeZah7Ux]

> of course the random Nebraskan's critical project is going to get a low "criticality score"

...which is the exact opposite of what it should be.

[abharya]

That is not true, check out this as an example - https://groups.google.com/g/wg-securing-critical-projects/c/.... We are just trying to help, so please provide constructive feedback and any ideas on metrics we can use.

[sansnom]

Nice tool.

I think we could improve it a bit. For example, Spring boot should have a very low score for me. It's backed by a large company Pivotal. They don't need any support I think. Same thing for elasticsearch.

For me:

    - backed by a large company ? 
 
    - number of contributor doing 80% of the work ? or active in the last 12 months ? commits breakdown (99% is done by one guy) ?  

    - issues created/closed ratio  

    - PR created/merged ratio  

    - use critical projects ?  

    - other from your original score

A nice bonus: if we could use the tool to assess critical score for our project (not globally). For local dependency, we could increase the critical value if dependents count is low. Very few person is using it: that's a bad sign. With this, we could find those dependencies.

We could also create a global score (like you did) by using the previous score and scaling it using the dependency usage (dependents_count like you did).

With this calculation, I think it's more likely to find relevant projects.

How to find it's backed by a large company ? Not sure about this, we can check if the project is part of an organization, if contributor have a company or if they have a pro account. For example, if the top 5 contributors are from Google, it's likely it's sponsored by it(could be done during their free time but less likely).

Note: check what happens with a stable project (no new issue and PR).

[carapace]

I'm not sure if this is relevant, but bash and the readline lib are both maintained by a single unpaid volunteer. (I don't know if he's from Nebraska though.)

[yorwba]

Gensim is #119 in the list according to your link, far behind projects with many more active contributors, so hardly a resounding success of your scoring method.

In terms of metrics, you could start by weighing projects with few contributors as more critical, not less. Specifically, gensim does appear to have had quite a few contributors, but the bulk of the code was written by the single maintainer https://github.com/RaRe-Technologies/gensim/graphs/contribut... So maybe you should add a metric "percentage of code in the past year authored by the top contributor".

If you want to go about it in a more data-driven fashion, you could go through the top projects for each language, check whether they actually need your support (e.g. find out what the development goals are, ask whether the current resources are sufficient and what they'd do with the additional resources you can provide) to get a ground-truth labeling of critical projects, then readjust your weights to match the ground truth.