#168 – Hari Shanker on Understanding and Showing WordPress Contributions

Transcript

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case understanding the nature of WordPress contributions and making sure that contributors understand where they might be needed.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast. And you can copy that URL into host podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Hari Shanker. Hari has been a member of the WordPress community since 2007, and has contributed in various capacities, including as a full-time contributor for several years, working with Automattic, working with initiatives like Five for the Future, and supporting numerous community events around the world. He currently volunteers his time as a community program manager, helping to grow and support the WordPress ecosystem from his home in India.

If you’re involved in the WordPress project, you likely know how vast and complex the contributor ecosystem can be, but you might not have heard of the WordPress Contribution Health Dashboards. An experimental initiative aimed at making sense of all the communities moving parts by gathering, visualizing, and sharing contribution data.

But why does WordPress need something like this? Well, it could help new and existing contributors figure out where to pitch in, and how their work might guide the project’s future growth. Hari’s here to explain.

We start the podcast by going off on a tangent, discussing the landscape of WordPress in India. India is experiencing a huge upswell in community activity, innovation and youth engagement, and it’s exciting to hear about.

We then dive into the main thrust of the podcast, the Contribution Health Dashboards. How the idea came about. Who helped drive it forwards. Why it’s proving so challenging to build, and the massive value it promises for contributors, team reps, project leadership, and anyone curious about where WordPress needs help.

We look at the practical aspects too. What tools are, and aren’t, available? The difficulty of tracking data across the many platforms WordPress uses, and what kinds of skills, and volunteers are needed to push this work forward.

Hari shares his vision for accessible visual dashboards that can guide contributors of all skill sets, and help make the best of every single contribution hour.

If you’ve ever wondered how to make your WordPress contributions matter even more, or how the project could be better supported by data driven insights, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Hari Shanker.

I am joined on the podcast by Hari Shanker. Thank you for joining me.

[00:03:53] Hari Shanker: Thank you for inviting me to the podcast and I’m so excited to be here, Nathan.

[00:03:58] Nathan Wrigley: I am really pleased that you’ve joined me. We had aspirations of doing this podcast from Manila, but things conspired against us, and so we are doing this via an online call, let’s say a Zoom call or something like that. So I’m really pleased that we could finally hook up.

The intention is to talk today about something that I suspect many people in the WordPress community will not know a great deal about. So it is called the WordPress Contribution Health Dashboard, or dashboards I should say. And we’ll get into that in a moment. What it is. Why it exists, and how that project is moving along.

But before then, Hari, would you mind just giving us your little bio, your introduction to who you are, where you live, what you do in the WordPress space. As much as you like, really over to you.

[00:04:44] Hari Shanker: Thank you so much, Nathan. So my name Hari Shanker. I live in the south of India, in a city called Kochi. I’ve been with the WordPress community since 2007. I’ve been contributing actively since 2016. I have been contributing full-time. I had been contributing full-time from 2020 to 2024.

At this point, I’m a volunteer contributor. I used to work with Automattic for a while, from 2016 to 2025. At this point I’m not employed, I am a volunteer contributor, very much excited to work on WordPress. And I’ve done a bunch of things with WordPress. WordPress is one of my biggest passions.

My work has mostly been in the community team. I am still a community program manager, which means I approve events, I support events, and my work has mostly been in the contributor experience of WordPress. I led the Five for the Future initiative for quite a long time. And I was also working on the WordPress Contributor Working Group, where we held three editions of the WordPress Contributor Mentorship Program.

As I said, I live in Kochi. I have a wife and I have three cats. I absolutely love it here. They call Kerala Gods own country, and I love the state, I love where I live. And I love the fact that I can work on the best open source software in the world, sitting in my lovely little city, in my lovely little apartment. That’s all about me.

[00:05:58] Nathan Wrigley: That’s so nice. That’s really lovely. Can I just segue a little bit and steer away from the conversation that we’re intending to have? And ask you about WordPress in India?

Now, obviously you may not have your finger on the pulse of everything that’s going on, but I’m curious. Not having been to India during the period I’ve been using WordPress, I have an intuition that it’s a thriving community over there, dare I even say, a growing community.

But that’s just based upon the little bits and pieces that I’ve captured from friends, and articles that I’ve seen. And there seems to be this big upswell in plugin development, and agencies that are really doing great work. So there isn’t really a question there, it’s just more, tell us about how WordPress is going in India.

[00:06:40] Hari Shanker: Absolutely. So you got it right. WordPress, the WordPress economy, the WordPress ecosystem is really thriving. As you said, it’s everywhere. Like, the plugin ecosystem, we have VIP agencies. We have so much innovation happening in WordPress. We have companies like InstaWP. We have agencies like rtCamp, Multidots. There’s so much innovation happening. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

There is also so much community activities happening. We’ve had so many of these events, so many innovative WordPress events, we’ve had WordCamps.

So I was involved in setting up an event called WordPress Photo Festival, and we’ve had a WP Campus Connect. We’ve had a host of women’s day events that were held on March 8th. Again, that’s the tip of the iceberg. There’s so many activities happening. So be it innovation in plugin development or theme development.

And again, themes are big in India. We have had, Astra theme comes from India. So many of these activities happening. And it’s not just centered in one city, it is really all over the place. So in Kerala where I live in, we have very thriving community. We have folks who’ve come up from the community, and who’ve built things that have made waves all over the world. And again, across different cities, be it Mumbai, Pune, Ahmadabad, Kolkata, Ajmer.

So India is, as you know, is a big country. So we have a host of these local WordPress meetup groups and several thousands of community members. And I do not use the word thousand as a euphemism. It really is, like we actually have thousands of community members who are doing cutting edge work. And I can tell you, it is so inspiring to see. I mean, as an open source fan, like it really gives me the energy to keep going.

So yeah, you are right. WordPress is thriving. And we have WordCamp Asia coming to India, in Mumbai in 2026. I am very excited about that.

I was actually the mentor of WordCamp Asia for a short while, but this point I’ve stepped down. I have applied as an organiser and I hope to be in the organising team as well. So I think it’s the best time for WordPress in India, and we still have heights to conquer. The best is yet to come. Super excited about all that.

[00:08:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s really great because it does seem in different parts of the world, and maybe this will feed into the conversation that we’re about to have, it does feel in other parts of the world. So I’m in the UK, and it does feel that the community side of things has definitely taken a bit of a hit since the pandemic, so 2019 and beyond.

Those meetups that happened in some cases have come back, but in the majority of cases, they still are either dormant or perhaps have been abandoned. And I feel that the same might be true across Europe and North America. I can’t speak to whether that is accurate or not, but that’s the feeling that I get.

It does feel, like I said, the news that I see, the articles that I read in WordPress journalism, it really does feel like India is exactly as you’ve described it. But also it feels like it’s not just confined to WordPress, it’s tech in general. It feels like there’s, well, maybe renaissance is the wrong word, but there’s just a huge pivot in all things tech over to places like India. You know, whether that’s, I don’t know, SaaS apps and so on, but CMSs as well. It does feel like India is definitely on the rise in all manner of tech.

[00:09:41] Hari Shanker: Absolutely. I think there’s a bunch of reasons for it, but in my mind, I think a big reason for that, I wouldn’t call it the biggest reason, is our very young population. India’s population at this point is over 1.4 billion. I’m not aware of the latest number, but I think it’s around 1.5 billion. So off the top of my head, I think at least 50% of it is a young population. They are less than 35 years of age.

All these young folks, they’re coming in with so much energy. There’s an abundance of human capital. And we are in the internet age, and one good thing that happened after COVID-19 is a lot of these folks got connected. And India has really cheap internet. I mean, of all the places that I’ve traveled to, internet in India has been the cheapest that I know. So it’s really easy to get connected.

And a lot of these people who are connected, they’re using it very productively. That is one of the reasons why you’re seeing this spurt of activity. And there’s been a lot of these inspiring stories, which is really inspiring the youth. And WordPress being what it is, is seeing a lot of this innovation coming in.

But I think, again, we’re really at the tip of the iceberg. The best is yet to come, because I see a lot more people coming into the community. And my hope is with WordCamp Asia happening next year, we will see a lot more of these young folks embracing WordPress, not just tech, but embracing WordPress, and doing a bunch of innovations. So I think the goal for the Indian community is to get all these young people to WordPress.

[00:10:53] Nathan Wrigley: It’s interesting that you mentioned the young people. I was just wondering if there was a connection between, for example, education, you know, school and the emergence of jobs. I don’t know what age you leave school in India, but in the UK it would be typically 16 or 18. And at that point you’re perhaps going on to higher education, so university, something like that, or finding a job.

And I think there’s been a real effort in the UK to supply education in tech. But it doesn’t really seem to pivot around open source software. It tends to pivot around, can I use this already existing product? Often a kind of Microsoft version of something, in order to create wealth or a job. But I don’t know if there’s more of a pivot in India to use open source things to teach those kind of things.

So again, there’s no question there. It’s just more of an observation really.

[00:11:41] Hari Shanker: Yeah, so I think your observation is pretty astute. But I think India has a bit of a USP here when it comes to open source. We have had an open source movement since time immemorial. I mean, specifically my state of Kerala, we have a very uniquely liberal government. So they sort of stepped away from proprietary software and embraced open source software as early as in the nineties.

So Richard Stallman, when he used to be active in the community, he used to visit Kerala almost every other year. And we, as a result of that, have a pretty thriving open source community in my state.

All sorts of open source from Linux distributions, to Python and WordPress of course, and Drupal, and we have all these communities very active and thriving.

And a lot of the young people, they get their introduction to tech through these open source communities, which have local chapters. It’s not just related to my state, even though my state has a pretty high population of this, a lot more people doing this. I would say that the open source movement is pretty active all across India. So we have these big open source conferences in some of the big universities. We have these small local chapters where people get active. So at some point or the other young people who are interested in tech, they get some introduction to open source. And a lot of people are enamoured by the philosophy.

Now, coming specifically to the WordPress community, we have recently had some really good events. So these are in a youth camp format. I was involved in one of them. And there was an event called WP Campus Connect that was held in Ajmer, Rajasthan, which is held by Pooja Derashri. So these events, they were experiments really, but they’ve been quite successful, especially I would say the WP Camps Connect event. It’s been fantastic.

Like, it was an event series, and as a result of those events, I don’t know the numbers, but off the top of my head, at least 200 to 300 people, 300 kids, they got introduced to WordPress directly. I’m not just talking about, you know, setting up websites, they got an introduction to the community. And those efforts are really paying off. We are seeing these people coming into the community and being active.

So the gist of what I’m saying is, yes, you are right. We are seeing an open source movement and we, a lot of these young kids, I mean of course a lot of them, as you said, they move to proprietary technology, but they have more of a window into open source as they blossom.

[00:13:40] Nathan Wrigley: The interesting thing I suppose about that is, given the long march of history and having many decades into the future, that groundswell amongst the younger people now is going to paint a really interesting picture in a couple of decades time. So in the 2030s and the 2040s, it’ll be interesting to see how that movement, the young people obviously going into the marketplace, and getting a job in some industry or other, it’d be interesting to see how that all plays out.

Because one of the things that I always notice when I go to WordCamps is that age thing. The demographic of age, it always seems to skew older rather than younger, you know? If you were to say, how many people here are over, I don’t know, let’s say 45 or 50? I think there’d be quite a few hands. And if you would say, who’s under 20? Very few. Certainly in my part of the world. So it will be interesting how that shakes out.

But how positive is that? That’s such a great way to begin this podcast. I don’t know if you want to, if you’ve got anything more you want to leverage into there quickly before we move on, feel free to.

[00:14:40] Hari Shanker: I just want to add a quick comment. That is a huge opportunity, and to be honest with you, even in India, even with the huge population, the WordPress events that we have, we still haven’t seen that influx yet. But the good news is that it’s changing. It definitely has an effect because when I started organising events for the community in 2016, we got a lot of the young kids and I am seeing them.

So it’s been eight years. I’m seeing the same people, they’re making waves. I know three or four specific examples of folks who got into the community as college students and then really went places. So if we are able to, when I say we, I’m referring to the WordPress community, or specifically the Indian WordPress community. If we are able to leverage it well, and if we manage to keep the momentum and grow it, I would say the sky is the limit. So I am super optimistic and extremely excited about where the future lies for WordPress in India.

[00:15:25] Nathan Wrigley: So that was supposed to be like a one minute aside, and there we go. We’ve had a really interesting conversation about what WordPress is doing in your part of the world. Thank you for that. That was really interesting.

Let’s pivot now to the article. And I’m going to, in the show notes, I’m going to link everybody to an article which Hari wrote towards the latter part of last year, so 2024, September. And it was called WordPress Contribution Health Dashboards: An Experiment.

Now, obviously if you are in the WordPress ecosystem and you’ve been here for many years, you will have no doubt figured out how complicated and tangled WordPress is. Not just the community, but the software, the code, the events, the different teams which make up WordPress, the multitude of ways that you could become involved.

And I think it would be fair to say that if you were new to WordPress, that could be pretty overwhelming. It would be fairly easy to sort of step into the community and think, what? Where do I belong? Where do I fit? Where is my experience best used? Where would I find the most, fun or engagement, or meaning in the WordPress space?

And so it feels like these contribution health dashboards might be some version of trying to get an understanding of what WordPress is, where the gaps are, where the holes are being filled, where the holes in the future might emerge and so on. But just unpack it for us. Who’s involved? What is the idea of a contribution health dashboard?

[00:16:54] Hari Shanker: Great question. And thank you for the excellent introduction, Nathan. I think you did a great job of explaining everything.

To summarise, the idea behind the contribution dashboard is to have sort of like a cockpit or bird’s eye view of WordPress contributions. WordPress, as you know, has around 20, 22 contribution teams, and these teams are doing a bunch of different activities. As you said in your introduction, it’s very hard for everybody to follow this.

So the hope of this project is to build a dashboard, or dashboards, which provide anyone, not just contributors, really anyone in the community to get an idea of where things are with WordPress. So it involves updates on the release, latest releases. It involves activities from various teams, like Core, community, training, photos, meta, et cetera.

So to give anybody who is coming from any part, with any experience, to give them an idea about where things are. Because at this point it’s very hard to follow. We have these blogs, we have Slack, we have Trac, we have GitHub. When those contributions to spread out across multiple places, it’s very hard, even for experience folks to follow. So the hope behind this project was to simplify this with the help of data, and specifically data visualisation. So that is the project specifically.

Now, as regards to who is involved, I will need to share some history and I promise I’ll be brief. So this started as a collaborative effort with a bunch of folks, I should say Courtney Robertson’s name. Courtney has been a real force for good for this project. Like, she’s been very active. So Courtney Robertson, Naoko Takano, myself, Isotta Peira, and a bunch of contributors all over the world.

We all came up with this idea. This idea has been floated around for a long, long time. We need dashboards. It could be helpful. But we were not able to make a ton of progress.

So around WordCamp Europe 2023, there was a question asked in the keynote to Matt Mullenweg and he advocated for it. He said it would perhaps be good to have dashboards, which will bring all this information together.

So that was when all these efforts really gathered momentum. So Courtney was one of the first people to be really excited about this, she really led this forward. And since I was working on contribution health, I was part of the Contributor Working Group, I was also very excited about this. So Courtney and I, we joined hands and we kicked off efforts.

So we first looked at having a tool that will help set things up. But that is when we realized that it could get really complicated, and a lot of the existing tools out there, it may not really fit the bill. But we also needed to find out what we need to measure. What should be there in these dashboards? That was a big question that we had.

So we published a couple of blog posts in the Sustainability Team and the Meta Team. We got a bunch of ideas from the community. We did a lot of on the ground research. Progress was very slow, but we eventually found a tool called Bitergia. Bitergia is a paid tool, it costs a lot of money. Automattic were kind enough to sponsor the tool for the time being.

So we got a paid subscription with some of us having access to it. And we looked at the data, we crunched numbers. But the limitation of Bitergia was that it only looked at GitHub, like the WordPress GitHub. So if you look at the dashboard, the data for that needs to come from various sources, right? The Make WordPress Slack, there’s the P2 blogs, there’s Trac. So this tool was only limited to GitHub.

So after a lot of discussion with the community, and we held several project health hangouts all the way, Courtney Robertson, myself,  Naoko Takano, Isotta Peira, , all of us, we decided to do, with support from Josepha Hayden, who was then Executive Director of the project, and Chloe Brigmann, we decided to do an experiment.

We picked three teams, which was the Core Team, Community Team, and the Training Team. And we identified some KPIs, or progress some metrics, which we found out by discussing with the team members. We used the tools that we have, which includes Bitergia and some data that was already available. For instance, for the 6.6 release, we had the spreadsheet which developers always release once a release comes out, like you have the list of contributors. So we crunched numbers, we did some visualisations, and we published the blog post that Nathan, you’ve linked in the show notes.

So that is what we’ve done in short. It’s an experiment. We’ve shared some data that we have on what we’ve collected. We’ve identified some KPIs.

So the challenge that we have is, building a full fledged dashboard is time intensive, resource intensive. The Bitergia dashboard that we have, it’s very limited. It does not give out out the whole information. That post really is a snapshot. And we have data from January through September, 2024.

So the post, the content that we have, those are really snapshots of the project of contributions for the Core Team, Training Team and the Community Team, as well as stats for WordPress 6.6.

We went out, we put it out there, we hope to get feedback. So that’s what we’ve done. We’ve not moved ahead from there. But that’s a whole executive summary of the project and a history of what we’ve done.

We did get a lot of positive feedback from folks who were fascinated to find some of the information, which is not previously available. The good thing that we’ve done is we were also able to set some KPIs. But the work has not progressed since, we are still there. And it’s a resource intensive project, it needs more contributors and more work to be done in order to move forward. But that’s a brief summary of everything that we’ve done.

[00:21:48] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect. We’ll get into that bit in a moment, the resource intensiveness of it. But just an observation from my point of view is that, typically, I think if you were to do this experiment in a corporate environment, the data would go to the board of directors, if you know what I mean. So that they could inspect that and figure out how to, I don’t know, cut out waste, or figure out who needed to be employed, where people needed to be pushed around in the organisation in order to maximise things.

But whole point in a corporate environment would be the data would end up going north. It would end up towards the senior management way of looking at things. But this is not that. This is a democratised way. In effect, it’s kind of the opposite. The data is intended to be open for absolutely everybody, so all people can see all of the things.

And if somebody new were to drop into the project, yes, they might not understand what all of the data means, but at least they might get an understanding of, okay, that team over there looks as if it’s really fallen on hard times. That team over there, they seem to be doing great. Okay, maybe some of my time needs to be given over here. But the point being, the data is not so that senior management can do things if you like. It’s so that everybody would be able to see the same view. I hope that’s what it is anyway.

[00:23:04] Hari Shanker: That is exactly what it is, but we also hope to influence the senior management there as well. And when I say senior management, it’s not just for this project leadership, it’s also the contributors, the folks that keep the lights on. So that would mean Core committers, team representatives, anyone really.

And again, like you said, the beauty of WordPress, it belongs to everybody. So that’s the way it’s supposed to be, right? So we want to make sure that anyone can benefit something from it. So if it’s a new contributor, they can find out which projects need help. They should be able to identify the areas that they can contribute directly to.

For leadership, they should be able to see the leading indicators or like the areas where the project is doing really well. And the lagging indicators, where a project needs help so they can make better decisions. And they should be able to change the project goals alongside, by understanding the data. So essentially it is aimed at everybody, not just the top down folks. And that is the hope that we came to this with.

[00:23:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, perfect. Now, anybody that’s been in the WordPress space or contributed in any way you will have come across all the tools. You know, there are so many. There’s Trac, there’s P2, I suppose, if you’re working in that environment. There’s Slack. There’s probably a bunch of others as well. I’m sure you could list a whole bunch more.

And if you’ve ever wrangled with APIs or, I don’t know, web hooks or whatever it may be, trying to wrangle data, it’s a hard task. And it does require a lot of human intervention at the beginning.

I’m wondering, is the intention of the project to get it to the point where the human intervention can kind of step away? Because the hard work has been done. We’ve now understood how to capture the data. How to regurgitate the data. How to display the data. So that at some point it will be less about figuring out how to make the data meaningful and more about, okay, now everybody look at the data and draw conclusions from the data.

But it sounded from your description as if we’re still in the, how do we even get the data in? How do we recycle the data? How do we pull it in, regurgitate it and display it ?Again, is that about right?

[00:25:03] Hari Shanker: You are 100% right. That’s exactly where we are in at this point. I think I shared some of the background earlier. The challenge is, we are working on data, it’s a lot of work. I know this because I did a lot of the work in creating the pages that we have.

Unfortunately, we do not have a tool that gets all the data from all the sources. Any tool that we have, it will need to be customised extensively, and that needs developer help. We do not have a ton of data engineers in the WordPress community. We do have some folks, but they are not in the position to contribute their volunteer time towards this.

So this needs investment in terms of developer hours, in terms of more tools, in terms of integrations. So in short, this is a huge endeavor. This needs investment from several organisations working in WordPress for this to really succeed, at least to the vision of what we have. That is the realisation that we had.

But yes, the goal, if the project were to succeed, we should ideally need automated tools that automatically show data. Because if you were to publish this data manually, it’s a lot of work. I am not sure is the best returning because like, I worked with volunteers when I was working on the Contributor Mentorship Program, and I respect volunteer time.

They have daily jobs, even sponsored contributors. They have a ton of things to do. Everybody’s overloaded. That time is very precious, and using the time and creating these dashboards, trust me, it’s extremely resource intensive. Like, between Courtney and myself and, Isotta and Naoko, we took a lot of time to prepare the dashboards that were out today. So we did that as an experiment to inspire folks so that we can get things done.

But if you ask me, is it worth it to keep updating it? I’m not sure. Because I’m not sure if it’s worth the number of hours. Maybe we can do it. Maybe if there’s more folks to help out, it can be continued. But my hope would be to create an automated tool. I’m convinced that it is going to benefit folks.

[00:26:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, I guess that if you do everything manually and you draw the conclusions manually, you’ve got those one set of conclusions. And really what would be ideal is a portal, for want of a better word, where people can go and see and mine the data for themselves, and display it in interesting ways, and can consume it, and then decide how they’re going to display that and drill down in different ways. And obviously that requires automation.

So, okay, we’re recording this kind of the gap between May and April in 2025. If you could, and I should probably say, you know, the listenership to this podcast is fairly wide. If you could ask for people to come and assist with this project, what kind of people at this moment in time are you looking for. You mentioned that you know, there’s not many people who are really interested, maybe in data manipulation and what have you, in the WordPress project. Just give us an idea of who you would wish to speak to you after they’ve listened to this podcast.

[00:27:45] Hari Shanker: Anyone really. I’ll share why. The beauty of WordPress, and I think I’ve explored different open source projects and I think the beauty of WordPress is there’s something for anyone. So a big part of what we need to do is research. And in the sense of, what do people need to measure?

So any feedback that folks can give on what they would like to see in a dashboard, that would be helpful. So if you are a listener to this podcast and you have ideas on what you would like to find out, that feedback itself is a big contribution. That will go a long way. That is a big part of the information that will help us.

On the next level, I would like to have developers who are familiar with Python and data visualisation and things like that. We have explored different ways to do this. I’ve spoken with several Core committers and folks like Jb Audras who, I mean, Jb Audras does a ton of this amazing work. He publishes release information.

So I was inspired by that. And the 6.6 dashboard that I published was very much built on his work. He does a lot of that work. So he’s just published something on WordPress 6.8 in his blog, and he regularly publishes the, a month in Core, year in Core posts in the Make Core blog, which has some of this information.

So folks like that who have time to spare, who are really good with visualisations, that could be really helpful. And what Courtney and I, and Isotta and Naoko, what we had identified, what our group had identified was that we need a tool, we need an external tool. It’s very hard to build something from scratch.

What would really help is to manipulate a tool. And there’s a bunch of open source tools. There’s GrimoireLab, which is, it’s an industry standard tool. It’s an open source software. It powers several open source projects. And there’s a company called Bitergia, which builds on  GrimoireLab, to, provide like a sponsored alternative, which is the one that we are using.

We reached out to them to see if they can build something for us. They quoted a very high price. Currently Automattic is paying €1,000 per month. They quoted upwards of 30 to €40,000 to build this integration. That’s a huge amount of money and I don’t think we have the bandwidth to do it.

So what we need is to bring, again, for folks listening, if you’re a developer, if you’re interested in data visualisation, I’d like to bring you all together to discuss what would be the best way forward.

So first, once we have the KPIs clearly identified, let’s see how we can collect all this data and how we can display it. Maybe we can build something. We are in the era of vibe coding. So I think it’s a lot easier than when we started this project in 2023. It’s not impossible. Perhaps we can build something, build some very simple dashboard, identify some core KPIs. Maybe have two or three dashboards per team, which can be really filtered. Maybe that is possible. Maybe we don’t need a tool.

So we need those developers, and folks with experience in data visualisation. Even like Core developers, like folks who have significant experience tinkering with Meta and Core and all that. So all these folks, if we are able to bring them together, I think we can do that. So I invite all of them to work on this.

[00:30:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So if any of that is making sense to you, can I just ask you to go to WP Tavern. Search for the episode with Hari, H-A-R-I. That’s probably all you need to know. Search there in the Tavern search and hopefully this episode will pop up. And from there you’ll be able to link in the show notes to the piece that is described where you can find all of the links to the people contributing, but also Hari. Are you open to people contacting you directly and beginning conversations with you one-to-one?

[00:30:57] Hari Shanker: Absolutely, absolutely. So at this time, as I shared on the beginning of the podcast, my time is slightly limited, but I’m more than happy to bring people together. That is my strength. And Courtney Robertson, she’s also very interested in this project. So like, between both of us, I think we can wrangle something and we can keep this moving.

Because I firmly believe that WordPress needs this. And if folks are able to volunteer their time, I’m more than happy to bring people together and to keep this project moving. So please, feel free to ping me directly. I’m Hari Shanker in the Make WordPress Slack. That’s H-A-R-I-S-H-A-N-K-E-R. As you said, Nathan, folks can comment in the Tavern blog post as well. So any way you can find me, I will find you.

[00:31:32] Nathan Wrigley: It feels to me like, you know when you go into a great big store or a shop, and I’m going to use supermarket as an example, where you’ve never been to that one before. You’re looking for a particular item. And you can literally spend so many minutes, hours even just searching around. You know, where’s the aisle? Okay, I found what I think is the right aisle. Now, in the aisle, which shelf am I looking for? And then, where is it?

This feels like that. It feels like signposting to, here’s the thing you want. You’re standing at the door and I’ll just grab you by the hand and I’ll take you to the thing that you need to purchase right away. It feels like these dashboards are going to be something akin to that. Just a way of alerting people to the project as a whole, think the supermarket in this case, and how to just make that journey a little bit easier. Make it obvious to everybody what needs help? What doesn’t need help? What’s working? What isn’t working?

How is it going to be manifested? This will be my last question really. What will this look like? Are we going to be looking at spreadsheets full of numbers? Are we going to be looking at charts? What is the intention? Because when I hear dashboard, I’m kind of immediately drawn to like line graphs and things like that. That’s what I’m imagining I’m going to end up seeing. But what would be the intention? Because some of this data would probably fit in that, but maybe some of it is just not going to be that. It’ll just be paragraphs of text, I don’t know.

[00:32:47] Hari Shanker: I will share my vision for the dashboard, and it might be very different from what we end up building.

I would like to build visualisations in the best possible way. So it involves charts, it involves charts of various kinds, pie charts, line charts. So the best form of information depicted in a very visual way, which gives folks a clear understanding of where the project is headed.

In the current version, we’ve included some text because we wanted to sort of like share our findings. But I think as you shared earlier in this podcast, we want folks to find out the data for themselves. And Bitergia currently allows folks to download the data directly as a spreadsheet or in a CSV format. We’d like to give folks that option too. So if you’re not comfortable seeing, or understanding, the data that is in front of you, you can download it and you should be able to manifest it or manipulate it in the way that you want.

So what I have in mind is a very visual dashboard full of charts. And the goal is to not over complicate things, which is why we are really looking at some certain KPIs for teams and for the project itself. For instance, if you look at the project, market share could be a KPI. It’s not necessarily what I, I’m just using it as an example.

So identifying certain key metrics and building charts of various kinds which manifest this data, and to make it as user friendly, and as accessible, and accessibility in the strictest sense of the world. So that anybody with any size sort of accessibility requirement should be able to view this data and understand it. That is the vision that I personally have, and I think Courtney also has a very similar vision. So yeah, that’s what I have in mind.

[00:34:18] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like in the year 2025, where we are at the moment, it feels as if, and we don’t need to go into the reasons. It does feel like contributor hours are more precious than they’ve ever been. And so that in and of itself is a fantastic reason to have data like this available.

So for example, I don’t know, let’s imagine that I’m an enterprise agency and I want my contributions to really count. Well, I could throw my staff in all different directions and not really know whether they were being deployed in something which was already completely fine, or whether there was an area which really needed a bit of work. It might not be the most glamorous piece of work in the world, but it needs that work to be done.

And because the contributor hours at the moment are, let’s use the word struggling, something like that, then having a window into what is needed, it does feel like this project has more importance now, perhaps even than just a year ago when you were sort of in the weeds of setting the whole thing up.

[00:35:16] Hari Shanker: I cannot agree more, because I’ve tried to collect this data together, to put this together. And I’ve seen the information that it can help companies. So you mentioned organisations or companies who are contributing through Five for the Future. So I was working on Five for the Future for a long time, and I was mentoring quite a few organisations who are stepping into WordPress.

So this data that I picked up, it really helped them. I was able to guide people into the areas that. We had folks who were doing other things, like they were able to contribute strategically, which I have specific cases of organisations who were able to improve their place in the WordPress economy by making strategy contributions.

So this is all very linked. And again, that’s where I’m coming from. I mean, and as you said, contributor hours are very precious. I personally feel that any time or effort set towards building data oriented solution could go a long way. It is a very impactful way of contribution, and if folks are there to help it out, the potentials are limitless. That is where I’m coming from.

[00:36:10] Nathan Wrigley: There are so many dots being connected in this episode. So we talked at the beginning about the fact that, you know, WordPress is a growing and interesting thing for the younger generation in India, but the project obviously needs contributors.

Those contributors need to fit into the holes in the jigsaw, the bits of the jigsaw, where the pieces are missing, if you like.

And so there’s this kind of virtuous cycle going on here where, if something like the dashboard can meaningfully impact where those contributors go, the jigsaw grows. The pieces where there’s blank missing pieces, they get filled in. And so, like I said, there’s this wonderful virtuous cycle nature to this whole thing. And what a fantastic project.

It’s hard to encapsulate in words what you’re trying to do, but I think we did a pretty credible job of doing that. So one more time, Hari is going to be available to whichever way he described. I will put in the show notes the links to the pieces and Hari’s contact details and things like that.

What an interesting project, one that many people I’m sure haven’t heard of. Is there anything that you wanted to say before we sign off?

[00:37:11] Hari Shanker: Well, all I want to say is, if you’re interested in data, please consider looking into this project, or if there’s anything that you can learn from the data that we picked up. I know it’s a little old at this point. As I said, this is a project that anybody can contribute to. So even if you have insights on what data is missing or what data that you would like to see, that feedback really goes a long way.

So feedback is the best gift that you can give in, again, in an open source project like WordPress, especially for an initiative like this. It goes a long way. So it’s a very impactful way of giving back to the project too. And I see contributions as investments, so if you would like to invest in WordPress in your free time, it’s a great way to do it by helping us build these dashboards.

[00:37:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, as you said, it’s like an impactful but kind of curious, interesting, powerful way of helping the community. And perhaps it’s something that you’d not heard of before. So Hari Shanker, thank you so much for explaining all that to me today and joining me on the podcast. I really appreciate it.

[00:38:07] Hari Shanker: Thank you so much, Nathan. It was truly an honor to be here, and I absolutely enjoyed talking to you about my favorite topic.

On the podcast today we have Hari Shanker.

Hari has been a member of the WordPress community since 2007, and has contributed in various capacities, including as a full-time contributor for several years, working with Automattic, working with initiatives like Five for the Future, and supporting numerous community events around the world. He currently volunteers his time as a community program manager, helping to grow and support the WordPress ecosystem from his home in India.

If you’re involved in the WordPress project, you likely know just how vast and complex the contributor ecosystem can be. But you might not have heard of the WordPress Contribution Health Dashboards, an experimental initiative aimed at making sense of all the community’s moving parts, by gathering, visualising, and sharing contribution data.

But why does WordPress need something like this? Well, it could help new and existing contributors figure out where to pitch in, and how their work might guide the project’s future growth? Hari’s here to explain.

We start the podcast by going off on a tangent, discussing the landscape of WordPress in India. India is experiencing a huge upswell in community activity, innovation, and youth engagement, and it’s exciting to hear about it.

We then dive into the main thrust of the podcast, the Contribution Health Dashboards, how the idea came about, who helped drive it forward, why it’s proving so challenging to build, and the massive value it promises for contributors, team reps, project leadership, and anyone curious about where WordPress needs help.

We look at the practical aspects too. What tools are, and aren’t, available. The difficulty of tracking data across the many platforms WordPress uses, and what kinds of skills and volunteers are needed to push this work forward.

Hari shares his vision for accessible, visual dashboards that can guide contributors of all skill sets, and help make the best use of every single contribution hour.

If you’ve ever wondered how to make your WordPress contributions matter even more, or how the project could be better supported by data-driven insights, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Hari on WordPress.org

Five for the Future

WordPress Contributor Working Group

WordPress Contributor Mentorship Program

InstaWP

rtCamp

Multidots

WordPress Photo Festival

WP Campus Connect

Astra theme

WordCamp Asia in Mumbai, India in 2026

WordPress Contribution Health Dashboards: An Experiment

Bitergia

Make WordPress Slack

P2

WordPress Trac

GitHub

GrimoireLab