# Community reach

> How inspect.software measures an organization's community reach — followers and portfolio-wide stars on logarithmic scales. 30% of the organization index.


**Community reach** measures an organization's traction: the audience that
follows it and the attention its portfolio has earned. Reach matters for the
same reason a repository's [popularity](/wiki/popularity) does — widely
watched software has more eyes available to notice problems — aggregated to
the level of the steward.

- **Assessment:** [organization](/wiki/organization-assessment), Activity & Reach category (40% within category)
- **Weight in organization overall:** 30%
- **Metric key:** `community_reach`

## How the value is computed

| Component | Weight | Criteria |
| --------- | ------ | -------- |
| Followers | 50 | log-scaled; ~1,000 saturates |
| Stars across repositories | 50 | summed over the sampled portfolio, log-scaled; ~10,000 saturates |

Both components are logarithmic for the same reason popularity is: each
order of magnitude counts roughly equally, so the metric differentiates
across the whole range instead of only flattering giants. Portfolio stars
are computed over the same sample (up to 100 most recently pushed public
repositories) as [portfolio activity](/wiki/portfolio-activity).

## Reading the result

- **Reach is attention, not use.** It is the weaker cousin of adoption
  evidence — kept at a moderate weight and paired with activity, which is
  harder to accumulate passively.
- **Followers and stars measure different things.** Followers attach to the
  organization itself (people watching the steward); stars attach to its
  work. An organization famous for one repository and followed by no one
  reads differently from an institution people track as such.
- Saturation points mean mega-organizations stop gaining: beyond ~1,000
  followers and ~10,000 portfolio stars the question is answered.

## Improving the value

There is no direct lever, deliberately. Reach follows the durable levers
measured elsewhere: maintained portfolios
([portfolio activity](/wiki/portfolio-activity)), complete public identity
([profile completeness](/wiki/profile-completeness)), and repositories that
are easy to adopt ([community health](/wiki/community-health)).

Related: [popularity](/wiki/popularity) ·
[organization assessment](/wiki/organization-assessment)