Swiss Open Source Software Benchmark

The Swiss Open Source Software Benchmark (ossbenchmark.com) continuously crawls repositories from Swiss GitHub organizations, aggregates statistics and provides an updated ranking of institutions, repositories and contributors. GitHub organizations are grouped into institutions from government, research, private sector, and NGOs. Additional GitHub organizations can be added by following the contributing instructions.

OSS Benchmark is an initiative by the Institute for Public Sector Transformation at Bern University of Applied Sciences. The initiative is managed by Matthias Stürmer and implemented by Anina Hold and Alexandre Thomas from the Digital Sustainability Lab.

Now some technical details about OSS Benchmark:

The Crawler: How does it work?

We have two different services:

• The DataService
• The CrawlerService

The CrawlerService startsup each hour and makes 5000 calls to the github api, saving everything in timestamped files.

The DataService also starts each hour. It loads all the crawled files from the last hour and saves all the data to the database. So the saved data is around one hour old when it is saved.

There can be 3 different states for the CrawlerService: no data, partial data, full data.

No data state

Start: If there is no data in the database besides the todoInstitutions.

The Crawler just starts with the first Institution that it gets. When an organisation is finished, it gets a timestamp in the todoInstiution collection. When a whole instituion is finished it also gets a timestamp in the collection. The crawler skips all organisations and institutions which timestamps are younger than 7 Days.

Partial data state

Start: If there are already some crawled institutions and organisations

The crawler gets the next institution and/or organisation that was never crawled or which timestamps are older than 7 days. It may happen that 7 Days are not enougth to crawl all data, so there may be some re-crawls of already crawled repos before new ones are crawled.

Full data state

Start: All institutions and organisations were already crawled at least once.

The crawler will just update the data, starting with the oldest timestamp.

System Diagram

Database Stucture

Update Institutions (read also Contributing.md)

Once someone has updated the github_repos.md file and the pull request was merged, the new or updated insitution must be added to the database using the Input Mask for new Institutions. This Input Mask is protected.