Zope Mailing List Metrics

I wanted to try to get an idea of the "health" of the Zope community over time. The only hard data I have available are metrics related to Zope maillist posts. I got the available mbox-format archives of each maillist from the pipermail archives and used the Python mailbox module to get various data points. I then fed the resulting data into PyChart for visual inspection. For various Zope-related maillists over time, I graphed:

• Number of posts to the maillist (I just iterated over the archive mbox file til the end, counting each message)
• Number of distinct posters to the maillist (I used their email address)

I had a many problems doing this due to inconsistent and broken archive mbox formats over the life of the maillists (Barry Warsaw's name was taken in vain many times while I did this <wink>). As a result it's difficult to vouch for these results with 100% confidence. But they look plausible anyway and at least the random data points I chose more or less match up with what pipermail thinks, at least for the number of messages per month (although I actually think we're both wrong, the mailbox archives are awful). If anybody wants the [very ad-hoc] code I put together to do this, I'll send it to you.

All in all, the results are about what I expected to see given the general "feel" of the community over time. If you believe that these are reasonable metrics by which to gauge the health of the Zope community, and you believe the numbers are correct, you might say that the community's health hit its peak somewhere in mid-2001 and is now on a slow downward trend. This may because there are other solutions out there for the problem space that Zope competes in now, whereas three years ago or so, there really weren't. Or it might be because Zope hasn't been marketed by the community very well lately. Or maybe it's because people have been waiting for Zope 3 to be ready for prime time. In any case, I don't consider the results to be very positive.

# of messages sent to zope, zope-dev, zope3-users, and zope3-dev combined over time

# of messages sent to the Zope maillist only

# of messages sent to the Zope-dev maillist only

# of messages sent to the Zope3-users maillist only

# of messages sent to the Zope3-dev maillist only

# of distinct posters to zope, zope-dev, zope3-users, and zope3-dev combined over time

# of distinct maillist posters to the Zope list only

# of distinct maillist posters to the Zope-dev list only

# of distinct maillist posters to the Zope3-users list only

# of distinct maillist posters to the Zope3-dev list only