SasView event dashboard

A public, live progress page for SasView Contributor Camps, virtual hackathons, sprints and any other time-boxed event. It shows what happened on GitHub during the event: PRs opened and merged, issues opened and closed, commits, reviews, first-time contributors, and the split between new work and cleanup of older PRs and issues.

Live page: https://www.sasview.org/event-dashboard/

• Pick an event: ?event=<id> (or the menu at the top right when there is more than one)
• Projector view, with large text for a screen in the room: add ?tv=1, e.g. https://www.sasview.org/event-dashboard/?tv=1

The page reloads its data every 10 minutes. The data itself is refreshed hourly while an event is running.

How it works

events/*.toml          one small file per event (title, dates, time zone, repos)
collector/collect.py   pulls activity from the GitHub REST API and writes JSON
site/                  the static page (index.html, app.js, style.css) + generated site/data/
archive/<id>/          frozen final numbers for finished events
.github/workflows/
  dashboard.yml        hourly: collect + publish to GitHub Pages (skips when no event is running)
  archive.yml          run by hand after an event to freeze its numbers

The hourly workflow checks whether any event is running (from one day before its start to one day after its end). If none is, it stops straight away, so it costs nothing between events. The generated data is published with the page and is not committed to the repo, so the history isn't cluttered with hourly data commits.

Adding a new event

1. Copy an existing file in events/ to a new name, e.g. events/2027-03-virtual-hackathon.toml.

2. Edit it:

   Key	Required	Meaning
   id	yes	Short name used in the URL (?event=...). Letters, digits, -, _.
   title	yes	Heading shown on the page, e.g. "SasView Contributor Camp XVI".
   subtitle	no	Line under the title, e.g. a venue or "virtual".
   link	no	Link to the event's wiki or info page.
   start, end	yes	First and last day, inclusive, as YYYY-MM-DD.
   timezone	yes	Days are counted in this zone, e.g. "Europe/Prague", "America/New_York", "UTC" for virtual events.
   repos	yes	List of repos, e.g. ["SasView/sasview", "SasView/sasmodels", "SasView/sasdata"].
   baseline_weeks	no	Weeks before the event used for "typical week" figures (default 8).
   exclude_branches	no	Regex of protected branches never measured (default ^release).
   [repo."Owner/name"]	no	Per-repo settings: source = [...] folders checked for docstring coverage; branches = [...] to choose the measured branches yourself.

   Example per-repo block:

   [repo."SasView/sasview"]
   source = ["src/sas"]
   # branches = ["refactor_24"]   # optional; the default branch is always included

3. Commit to main. The push triggers a build, and from the day before the event starts the page updates hourly by itself. Until the event starts, it isn't listed on the page.

To refresh immediately, open the Actions tab → Build and publish dashboard → Run workflow.

After an event

Open Actions → Archive an event → Run workflow, and enter the event's id. This saves the final numbers in archive/<id>/ and rebuilds the page. From then on the event is shown from the archive and is never fetched again, which keeps hourly runs fast as events accumulate.

What is counted

• Everything in the window counts, whether or not the person was at the event, since many people contribute remotely. Bot accounts (Dependabot, pre-commit) are left out.
• Window: 00:00 on start to 24:00 on end, in the event's time zone.
• Closed PRs are split into: new work merged; older PRs reworked (new commits during the event) and merged; backlog PRs merged as-is; older PRs closed without merging (cleanup); new PRs closed without merging.
• Commits: non-merge commits authored during the event on the default branch or on any PR branch active during the event, each counted once.
• Issues closed by a PR: the closing event names a commit, or a merged PR referencing the issue landed within ten minutes of the close. Everything else counts as closed by hand.
• First-time contributors: people whose first-ever PR to the listed repos was opened during the event.
• AI-assisted PRs: PRs with a Co-authored-by: trailer naming Claude, Copilot, Cursor, Codex or Gemini in a commit or the description.
• Backlog: open issues and PRs at 00:00 on the first day compared with now (or the end).
• Tracked branches: the default branch, plus protected branches that are not release branches (exclude_branches) and had commits during the event, e.g. refactor_24. Protection is a good sign of a shared development or release branch.
• Tests and docstrings: test functions (def test… in any .py file) and interrogate docstring coverage of the source folders, on each tracked branch at the last commit before the event and the latest commit. Changes include work written earlier but merged during the event. sasmodels' per-model test tables are not counted.
• CI: latest run of each of the repo's own workflows on each tracked branch (PR runs and GitHub's Dependabot/Copilot jobs are left out).
• Since the last release: commits on the default branch not in the latest GitHub release.
• Review queue: also shows lines changed per PR; the page gives median hours to first review and to merge for PRs opened during the event.
• Not counted: discussions, wiki edits and PR comments that are not reviews.

The full definitions are also at the bottom of the page.

Running locally

pip install -r requirements.txt
export DASHBOARD_TOKEN=<a GitHub token>   # optional, raises the API rate limit
python collector/collect.py               # writes site/data/
python -m http.server -d site 8000        # then open http://localhost:8000

Python 3.11 or newer is needed (for tomllib).

Changing the page

The page is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with d3 loaded from a CDN. There is no build step: edit site/index.html, site/app.js or site/style.css, run the collector once locally to get data, and preview with python -m http.server. New figures are added in collector/collect.py (activity in the window) or collector/extras.py (before/after and status) (each JSON file in site/data/<id>/ is one dataset) and drawn in site/app.js.

Repository settings this needs

• Settings → Pages → Source: GitHub Actions.
• Actions enabled for the repo. The workflows use the built-in GITHUB_TOKEN only, and no secrets need adding.

Note that GitHub turns off scheduled workflows in a repo that has had no activity for 60 days, which is likely between events. If the hourly refresh doesn't start for a new event, open Actions → Build and publish dashboard and click Enable workflow.

Credits

The before/after, CI, PR-size and release ideas follow Piotr Rozyczko's EasyScience org-health board.