# Community & Adoption

> The Community & Adoption category — users, downloads, attention, and a welcoming contributor setup. Weight: 18% of the inspect.software health index.


**Community & Adoption** measures whether a project has users, attention, and
a setup that welcomes contributors. Adoption is evidence: widely installed
software is exercised against more environments, more edge cases, and more
eyes than software nobody runs — and a project set up to receive contributors
converts that attention into maintenance capacity.

The category carries **18% of the overall health index**.

## Metrics in this category

| Metric | Weight in category | Weight in overall |
| ------ | ------------------ | ----------------- |
| [Popularity](/wiki/popularity) | 40% | 7.2% |
| [Community health](/wiki/community-health) | 35% | 6.3% |
| [Ecosystem adoption](/wiki/ecosystem-adoption) | 25% | 4.5% |

[Popularity](/wiki/popularity) reads GitHub attention — stars, forks,
watchers — on a logarithmic scale. [Community health](/wiki/community-health)
is a checklist of the files that make participation possible: README,
license, contributing guide, code of conduct, issue and PR templates.
[Ecosystem adoption](/wiki/ecosystem-adoption) goes past GitHub to the
package registries, where real download volume beats stars as an adoption
signal.

## Reading the category value

- **Registry downloads outrank stars.** Stars measure attention; downloads
  measure use. A package with modest stars and a million monthly installs is
  more load-bearing than a viral repository nobody depends on.
- **Repositories that publish no package** are not penalized: ecosystem
  adoption is `null` for them and the category renormalizes onto the other
  two metrics (see [supported ecosystems](/wiki/supported-ecosystems)).
- **Small-but-healthy is visible.** The community-health checklist does not
  depend on scale, so a young project with complete contributor
  infrastructure reads well even before adoption arrives.

## Improving Community & Adoption

- Complete the participation files: README, LICENSE, CONTRIBUTING, code of
  conduct, and issue/PR templates each carry documented weight.
- Publish to the ecosystem's registry and keep the package's repository link
  accurate — adoption evidence only counts when the package verifiably points
  back to the repository.
- Popularity follows use; the durable lever is making the project easy to
  adopt, document, and contribute to.

Related: [rating bands](/wiki/scoring-bands) ·
[the health index](/wiki/health-index)