It can be hard to communicate the benefit of open-source collaboration, the effort that goes into it, and its enormous impact on data science, to a non-technical audience. Visualizations can be very helpful here and we created a video showing the first six months of development of the mmrm R package. The video is based on the cumulative commit history of the git repository where the package development happens. It shows contributions to the “main” branch of the repository and how contributors add or edit files. Files are visualized by dots and arranged in a tree structure defined by the folders in the repository. The video is optimized for full HD quality.
Only direct code contributions are shown. This does not include, ideation, community organization, code reviews, bug reporting, or answering questions, and promoting the package - all of which are important to make such a project a long-term success.
If you want to co-star in the next iteration of the video, check out the mmrm git repository, get in touch and contribute! Our contribution guidelines can be found here.
We used gource to create the video following an example and guide by Nan Xiao.