For any FOSS community, newcomer onboarding is important but retaining them is critical. Since past one year, I have been working with the Fedora Community Operations team on community-oriented metrics and on improving contributor retention rates in Fedora. During this talk, I would like to share the findings from my work.

This talk will discuss about the methods FOSS communities can adopt to improve contributor retention rates. I will explain different community-oriented metrics we use at Fedora to understand community health like contributor engagement metrics, contributor onboarding and retention rates etc. I will then share some insights derived from finding common patterns in contribution activity of long-term active contributors i.e. Are long-term active contributors involved in many different areas of their projects? What are some good measures to predict longetivity of contributors ? What is the magic element X that makes people stay ? I will talk on how a community can apply the insights generated from these metrics to devise methods/guidelines to improve contributor retention rates and how an individual interested in contributing can ensure their prolonged interest in the FOSS project/organization.

In the end, I will also share my experience as a newcomer and contributor to Community Operations team of Fedora and have a brief QnA session about the steps FOSS communities apart from Fedora are taking to improve their contributor retention rates.