Quantifying the API Specification Communities

This is a project to quantify the scope of OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, JSON Schema, and Postman collection usage. Helping measure the size of each of the communities and the impact they are making, while also fleshing out wha the process and metrics are for the process used. I keep getting asked how big the OpenAPI community is and I don't have any good answers, and this project is to help change that.

Metrics

Here are some ideas for what we can do to measure the size of each community in meaningful ways:

• Twitter Followers
• Twitter Keyword / Hashtag Volume
• Github Stars
• GitHub Forks
• GitHub Watchers
• Services Adopted
• Tooling Adopted

Of course these each tell it's own story, but hopefully we can come up with something that works.

Data

Here is some data from each of the specifications, as we work to try to pull together some sort of set of metrics for making sense of the scope of each one.

OpenAPI (GitHub) (Twitter)

• Twitter Followers
  • 6,434 - 01/20/20
• Github Stars
  • 19,900 - 01/20/20
• GitHub Forks
  • 7,100 - 01/20/20
• GitHub Watchers
  • 871 - 01/20/20

AsyncAPI (GitHub) (Twitter)

• Twitter Followers
  • 1,514 - 01/20/20
• Github Stars
  • 1,400 - 01/20/20
• GitHub Forks
  • 104 - 01/20/20
• GitHub Watchers
  • 53 - 01/20/20

JSON Schema (GitHub) (Twitter)

• Twitter Followers
  • 239 - 01/20/20
• Github Stars
  • 2,100 - 01/20/20
• GitHub Forks
  • 198 - 01/20/20
• GitHub Watchers
  • 108 - 01/20/20

Ultimately it will come down to gathering data on the services and tooling that has adopted these specifications that will define the scope of each community in a meaningful way. We have separate projects doing this work, and it will be some time before we can determine how big these aspects of each specifications really are.

This is all a work in progress. We are still working to understand how we should be doing this. If you have ideas feel free to contribute, and help us make sense of the API specification layer of the API economy.

Open Questions

Here are some of the open questions I have about all of this:

• How do we track over time?
• How do we combine into one score?
• Or do we leave as separate scores?

We are using this README to manage this project, and Github issues to manage the conversation and all of the work that occurs around defining all of the areas of this work. If you have any contributions feel free to submit an issue or a pull request on this project, or any other in the API Specification toolbox, including the toolbox itself.