Methodology
How OSSRank works.
OSSRank is an observed public GitHub ranking built from official GitHub APIs. It refreshes weekly from point-in-time snapshots and is designed to be auditable and useful, not a complete census of every developer or repository on GitHub.
Update cadence
OSSRank is refreshed weekly from public GitHub API data. Each board shows the latest snapshot date in its header, and raw JSON snapshots include their exact generation timestamp and discovery query counts.
Discovery
Contributor and project candidates come from saved GitHub search queries. Each snapshot stores the exact discovery queries and accepted candidate counts. There are no manually curated username or repository ranking seeds.
Agentic boards
Agentic, Claude, Codex, and OpenClaw boards use GitHub repository search queries around public project text, topics, and recent pushes. They are category views over observable repository metadata, not endorsements or affiliation claims.
Rising contributors
The rising contributor board is derived from current contributor snapshots. It weights public commits, pull requests, and repositories against follower count to surface under-discovered active contributors. Contributor commit inputs use the same burst-adjusted signal as the main boards when an anomaly cap is applied.
Contribution burst handling
OSSRank keeps raw public GitHub contribution totals in every snapshot, but rankings use an adjusted commit signal when a contributor has a suspicious isolated burst relative to their own activity pattern. The cap is adaptive per user: it allows large AI-era jumps such as 10x or 20x growth, and it also gives high-baseline contributors much more room than low-baseline accounts. This targets shapes like a normally quiet account suddenly recording thousands of contributions per day for a short window, without imposing a global hard threshold that would punish legitimately high-volume maintainers.
Momentum map
The momentum map is derived from project snapshots. The vertical axis emphasizes recent merged PRs, commits, and releases; the horizontal axis emphasizes observed contributors, releases, issues, and stars.
Country matching
Country pages use public, free-text GitHub profile locations. Location labels are confidence hints only: exact country, city match, multi-location, profile text match, or unknown. They are not verified nationality, residence, or identity claims.
Project metrics
Project pages use GitHub repository search plus recent merged PR counts, recent commit counts, observed contributor counts, release counts, issue counts, and stars from official APIs. GraphQL recent merged PR and release windows are capped at the first 100 recently updated items, so high-volume repositories are displayed as 100+. Contributor count is observed all-time contributors when the REST budget permits, not unique contributors in the last 30 days.
Limitations
- GitHub search is capped and relevance/ranking are controlled by GitHub.
- Private contributions and private repositories are invisible.
- Profiles with missing or playful locations may be absent or misclassified.
- Snapshots are point-in-time weekly refreshes and may change as GitHub APIs update.