Request for proposals: Defining standardized GitHub metrics

GitHub's Social Impact and Policy teams issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) seeking a researcher to establish a list of publicly available GitHub platform usage metrics by country, intended to support disciplines such as international development, public policy, and economics. Despite being the world's largest code hosting platform with over 65 million developers, GitHub lacks a standardized, publicly accessible list of platform usage metrics, which has led researchers to rely on third-party resources like GHTorrent that aren't ideal for all fields. This RFP aims to address this gap by identifying metrics like the number and location of active users, repositories, organizations, and engagement activities such as pull requests and repository forks, excluding data from private repositories or Enterprise accounts. The initiative seeks to produce regularly updated metrics in accessible formats like .csv files to enhance research capabilities across various disciplines, with submissions for the RFP closing on November 1, 2021.