Portfolio activity — inspect.software wiki

Portfolio activity measures whether an organization's repository portfolio is actually maintained. Organizations accumulate repositories the way attics accumulate boxes; what distinguishes a working steward from a graveyard is the share of the portfolio that still moves.

Assessment: organization, Activity & Reach category (60% within category)
Weight in organization overall: 45%
Metric key: portfolio_activity

How the value is computed

Computed over a sample of up to 100 public repositories, most recently pushed first:

Component	Weight	Criteria
Recently active repositories	50	share of sampled repositories pushed within the last 90 days
Yearly active repositories	25	share pushed within the last year
Portfolio size	15	log-scaled; ~100 repositories saturates
Original work	10	share of sampled repositories that are not forks

Why shares, not counts

Ratios make organizations of different sizes comparable: an organization with 8 of 10 repositories active outreads one with 30 of 300. Size still earns its own (smaller, log-scaled) component, because a substantial portfolio is real evidence of capacity — it just cannot compensate for a portfolio that is mostly dormant. The original-work component keeps a wall of forks from impersonating a development organization.

Reading the result

Archiving is good hygiene, and the metric rewards it. GitHub excludes archived repositories from the default listing, so an organization that archives finished work concentrates its sample on what it actively maintains. Honest labeling improves the measurement — by making the measurement more accurate.
The 90-day component dominates: this metric describes the present, with the yearly component as its trailing context.

Improving the value

Archive repositories that are done or abandoned — the single most effective action, and it also serves the organization's users.
Keep maintained repositories visibly maintained: dependency updates and fixes count as pushes.