While open source projects can benefit from usage telemetry to understand their impact, privacy concerns often arise. This paper explores using publicly available metrics as proxies for actual usage data. Using the Flutter project as a case study, we found a strong correlation between these public metrics and Flutter's active user count, demonstrating that such publicly available metrics can offer insights into project usage while respecting user privacy.

While open source ecosystems have fluid membership by nature, explicit boundaries are necessary to conduct research and analysis around projects and their communities as these exercises require a set number of sources to count as part of this effort. The ideal solution to this problem would provide researchers and analysts with a common approach to identify what is part of or affiliated with a project community and ecosystem.