The Rust Project needs much better visibility into important metrics

@dikaiosune

Some more ideas based on recent conversations.

What are the prospects for expanding our data collection to rust-lang projects beyond rust-lang/rust? We put comparatively little effort into these repositories, so making it easier to see what’s going on in them at a glance could help us identify projects that need attention.

As an example we might create a page that graphs the open PRs in each project. Other metrics that could be helpful are open issues, untriaged issues, issues/PRs that haven’t been updated since X days.

Another thing I’m interested in is who is working on what. We’ve always been terrible at tracking resource allocation (knowing what people are and should be working on). If we had the existing information displayed in a more useful way I think we could potentially be better at it:

Imagine a page that displays information about all issues (across the entire org) that have assignments. It shows a list of all users (and their avatars) that have assignments, and next to that shows the linked issue number and description. That’s the whole thing.

From there you could get a strong sense of what the project is working on. Of course to start it would not be great because our data isn’t good and we don’t use assignments effectively. But once we have the visualization to monitor we’ll have a lot more motivation to use issue assignments. Somebody (I volunteer) could go through periodically and just review that all the assignments are still fresh. For moco employees this would be yet another attempt to track what we are working on - just seeing that everybody has some assigned task is :cool:. cc @aturon.

Another idea. There are lots of ways to configure github to display useful aggregations of information, but they are pretty hard to discover and remember. It would be great to have these cryptic formulas in one place, and linking them from our metrics site seems like it.