How It Works

Here's how the data is gathered and how the rankings are calculated.

1. Collecting Developers by Country

Gitista uses GitHub’s public API to search for developers based on their profile location. We maintain a curated list of 92 countries, and for each one, we search for users who have that country listed. For countries like the United States or United Kingdom, we include multiple location variants (e.g. "US", "USA", "United States", etc.) to ensure broader coverage.

2. Filtering by Follower Threshold

GitHub’s API requires filtering to return results efficiently, so we apply a minimum follower requirement for each country. This helps focus on developers with some level of community visibility. The threshold varies by country and is transparently listed on each country’s leaderboard page.

3. Ranking by Total Public Contributions

For each developer, we retrieve their public contribution activity, including pull requests, reviews, issues, and repositories. These are added together to calculate total contributions. Developers are then ranked within their country by this total contributions count and Top 100 are featured on the relevant country's leaderboard.

4. Building the Global Leaderboard

After country-level rankings are generated, we merge all contributors from all countries and rank them across the world based upon total contributions. Top 100 from this list are then featured on the Global Leaderboard.

5. Building Countries Leaderboard

Once individual country rankings are complete, we aggregate all the data to create a comprehensiveCountries Leaderboard. For each country, we calculate the total combined contributions from all qualifying developers within that country. This includes summing up all pull requests, reviews, issues, and repositories across every contributor. Countries are then ranked globally by their collective contribution totals, showing which nations have the most active open source communities. The leaderboard also displays the number of contributors from each country and their respective minimum follower thresholds, providing transparency into how each country's data was collected.

If Your Name Isn’t Listed

If you're an active contributor but don’t see yourself listed, please know this isn’t a reflection of your value or efforts. GitHub’s API has certain limitations and might not return every matching profile. Some common reasons:

• Your location field might be missing or not matched to one of the recognized country names.
• Your follower count may be below the country-specific threshold required for the API filter.
• Your public activity might not yet reach the cutoff for the top 100 in your country.

Gitista was created to uplift and celebrate open source work, not exclude anyone. If you'd like to be included, consider updating your GitHub profile location or increasing your public activity. We re-fetch and rebuild the data regularly, so changes will reflect soon!

Do you have any questions or suggestions? Feel free to reach out via contact page.