On Mon, Aug 5, 2024 at 8:14 PM Vinnie Falco
I would like the opportunity to help it become a many-generational institution singularly driven to support library development.
All of the Alliance activities are designed to drive up the number of volunteers and stabilize the project. The new website, a new logo (yes I know some people hate it), brochures and shirts at CppCon, Boost-related talks, supporting authors directly through the Staff Engineers program, continuous integration, better documentation, and IT support. Boost needs this because there is currently nothing in place to bring in new people to replace the older ones who depart the project for various reasons. Debates about what precisely needs to be done are all well and good, but action is better. To demonstrate the significance of this problem, I have written a script which counts the number of unique first names that have committed to any Boost library repository in a given year. This is what that graph looks like: [image: ua.jpg] The bash script is here: https://gist.github.com/vinniefalco/81a31b26b8bc9aa371ace8d065eec852 And this is a Google sheet with the output. I manually smoothed 2006 because it was an outlier. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BENN9T5bzX_aZp0FhlsGW5kcSuoTFm8M7oMJ... The Formal Review Process is a key social technology, and it works best when it has higher participation rates. Growing the number of volunteers or at least keeping the number from diminishing is important to support this. 2012 marks the transition from SVN to Git I believe. Beman retired in 2018 and passed away in 2020. The COVID epidemic was also in 2020. I am not sure if this affected the number of unique authors. If these calculations are correct, it indicates a dwindling supply of authors and by extension reviewers, review managers, and such. I hope maybe someone can find a big flaw with my script which invalidates the shape of the graph. Thanks
