Nathan Wrigley of WP Tavern’s Jukebox Podcast speaks with Hari Shanker, a long-time WordPress community member and volunteer community program manager based in Kochi, India. Hari has contributed since 2007, worked on contribution-focused roles including time at Automattic, led Five for the Future efforts, and supported mentorship and events around the world.
The conversation centers on two linked topics: the rapid growth of the WordPress ecosystem in India, and an experimental project to build Contribution Health Dashboards that collect and visualize contribution data to help people see where help is needed.
WordPress in India
India’s WordPress scene is expanding across plugins, themes, and agencies. Companies and teams such as InstaWP, rtCamp, Multidots, and theme projects like Astra are notable examples. Community activity is widespread across many cities, reflected in numerous meetups, regional WordCamps, and creative initiatives like the WordPress Photo Festival and WP Campus Connect.
Several factors power this growth: a young population, more affordable internet access, and pockets of strong open source culture—Kerala being a prominent example. Initiatives aimed at students, such as WP Campus Connect, have introduced hundreds of learners to WordPress, teaching technical skills while encouraging community participation. With WordCamp Asia slated for Mumbai in 2026, Hari expects further engagement and an influx of young contributors.
The problem: complexity and fragmentation
WordPress contribution activity is spread across roughly 20–22 teams (Core, Community, Training, Photos, Meta, and others) and across many platforms: GitHub, Trac, Make blogs (P2), Slack, release spreadsheets, and more. That fragmentation makes it hard for newcomers and even seasoned contributors to know where their help is most useful or what the current priorities and gaps are.
Contribution Health Dashboards: purpose and beginnings
The Contribution Health Dashboards project aims to give a bird’s-eye view of contribution activity across teams and releases and make that view openly available to the community. The dashboards are intended to help newcomers find ways to contribute, help team leads and organizations prioritize effort, and provide a clearer picture of project health.
The idea has circulated for years, gaining momentum after discussions at WordCamp Europe 2023. Early contributors include Courtney Robertson, Naoko Takano, Isotta Peira, Hari, and others. The Sustainability and Meta teams gathered community input to identify useful metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs).
An experiment and the tooling
To explore feasibility, the team ran an experiment using Bitergia (an analytics suite built on GrimoireLab), sponsored temporarily by Automattic. Bitergia gave useful insights but had limitations: it focused primarily on GitHub and didn’t capture many of WordPress’ data sources like Slack, Trac, Make blogs, and release spreadsheets.
For the prototype, the team concentrated on three areas—Core, Community, and Training—then talked directly with those teams to identify relevant KPIs. They pulled available data, including release contributor spreadsheets, and produced visualizations. In September 2024 they published a post showing snapshots for January–September 2024 and stats for WordPress 6.6. The goal of publishing was to generate feedback and encourage broader involvement, not to present a finished product.
Challenges and constraints
Creating a comprehensive, automated dashboard is resource-intensive. It needs developer time, data engineering, reliable integrations across many platforms, and ongoing maintenance. Existing tools require heavy customization to ingest and normalize WordPress’ varied data sources, and fully integrated paid solutions can be costly—estimates mentioned were in the tens of thousands of euros.
Volunteer capacity is limited; contributors and sponsored developers have competing priorities. Manual updates are possible for small-scale or one-off reports, but they are not sustainable as the project’s scope grows.
Vision and desired outcomes
The long-term vision is for automated, accessible dashboards that clearly visualize selected KPIs for individual teams and the broader project. Dashboards should be easy to use, filterable, and exportable (CSV/spreadsheet) so people and organizations can analyze the data themselves. Accessibility is a priority: visualizations should be understandable and usable by people with diverse needs.
These dashboards should serve several audiences: newcomers looking for places to help, team reps and project leadership assessing health and capacity, and organizations allocating staff time (for example through Five for the Future) so they can direct efforts where they’re most needed.
Call for contributors and support
The project needs help in a few areas:
– Research and product thinking to determine which metrics and KPIs matter to the community.
– Developers and data engineers with experience in Python, data visualization, GrimoireLab, and related tooling.
– Contributors who know Core, Meta, and other teams well enough to define meaningful KPIs and validate data interpretation.
– People who can build integrations for non-GitHub sources such as Slack, Trac, Make blogs, and release spreadsheets.
If the project receives funding or backing from multiple organizations, it has a clear path to the automated dashboards envisioned. Otherwise, a smaller, community-built solution using modern open tools could still achieve valuable outcomes.
How to get involved
Hari encourages anyone interested in data, visualization, or project health to join. Even feedback about what people want to see is a useful contribution. Interested contributors can comment on the WP Tavern blog post linked in the episode notes or message Hari directly in the Make WordPress Slack (username: harishanker). Nathan Wrigley’s episode notes on WP Tavern provide links and show notes for reference.
Why this matters
Contributor hours are limited and valuable. Better visibility into where help is needed enables individuals and organizations to deploy time more strategically, fill real gaps, and avoid duplicated effort. A data-driven view of contribution health can attract more contributors, strengthen teams, and improve the project overall—creating a virtuous cycle of clearer signposting, more focused contributions, and a healthier community.
Closing
Hari reiterates that feedback and volunteers are the most helpful gifts to the project. Building contribution dashboards is a high-impact way to invest contributor time in WordPress. The episode closes on a hopeful note about community collaboration, the importance of data-driven decisions, and continued growth—especially among younger contributors in India and beyond.
