I think these are some very interesting visualizations, though obviously
they are only mining commit data, not patch data, which doesn't account
for all the contributors in many instances.
See examples:
http://github.com/mpdehaan/cobbler/graphs/impact
http://github.com/mpdehaan/func/graphs/impact
You can see Func had some initial collaboration that was interesting and
then a spurt during Google Summer of Code.
Cobbler's really only gotten a good spurt over the last year, but is
shifting to at least 50% outside contribution. (A /ton/ of outside
patches happened via me applying them though)
While this data is skewed from only tracking things with git
attribution, increasingly though, more contributors
everywhere are using github, leading to better data.
The reason I brought this up is that this widget could be a very
interesting way to prevent list activity over time -- and maybe we can
borrow from the idea.
--Michael