Hi Russel, Thanks for creating this dashboard, it provides some great insights.
Regarding the First to Second KPI, I suspect the issue stems from a disconnect around AI-assisted contributions. People are drawn in expecting to learn and evolve the codebase using AI. Instead, a small group of maintainers is getting flooded with AI-generated code, causing PRs and issues to stall despite strong community interest. There seems to be a growing impression that AI can generate, validate, and ship code to production with minimal human oversight. I strongly disagree with this approach for critical systems like Iceberg that manage data globally. While AI drives enthusiasm and lowers the barrier to initial contributions, we remain limited by the human bottleneck of maintainers who truly understand the system. For new contributors, this initial hype often turns into a "dopamine crash" when they realize that, despite their sincere desire to help, maintainer bandwidth constraints can make their efforts feel like a dead end. Best regards, Jared Yu On Tue, Oct 27, 2026 at 7:36 AM Russell Spitzer <[email protected]> wrote: > At CoC I was impressed by Patrick's work on Cassandra Community health > dashboard - https://pmcfadin.github.io/cassandra-project-health/index.html > <https://pmcfadin.github.io/cassandra-project-health/index.html> and I > wanted one for Iceberg. > > So I built one here > https://www.russellspitzer.com/iceberg-community-health/index.html > > I'm concerned about our ability to keep up with contributions and track > whether folks are actually able to get > involved in the community as well as how we shape up against other > communities. I don't have any prescriptions yet, > but I am worried about the decline in "First to Second" Contributors > ecosystem wide but especially in the Java repo. > > Feel free to mess around with the data and I'm open to any suggestions. > The site is statically generated and based > on information pulled into the GitHub repository from which the site is > launched. > > > Everything is pretty viciously vibe-coded; I mostly discussed design and > implementation details without checking the actual code output. > > https://github.com/RussellSpitzer/iceberg-community-health > -- Best regards, Jared Yu B.S. Statistics - University of California, Davis '19 M.S. Data Science - Johns Hopkins University '22
