Nebraska: the person holding up your project has a name
This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Generosity Edition What I Built My first three ideas were a donation tracker, a volunteer matcher, and a transparency dashboard for a nonprofit. All fine. All things a hundred other people were about to build. Then I noticed something about my own week. I had installed roughly four hundred packages. I had thanked exactly zero people. Not because I am…
In a submission for the Weekend Challenge: Generosity Edition, developer Marcelo-Henry created a tool called Nebraska. The tool takes a package.json file and uncovers the people behind the packages. Nebraska ranks them based on how much they contribute to the project and how little support they receive in return. The website demo, marcelo-henry.github.io/nebraska, allows users to input a package.json, GitHub URL, or just a package name.
It then provides a visualization of the dependency tree and highlights the people who carry the most weight with the least support. Nebraska's creator discovered that many packages are maintained by a single person with no way to accept money, creating a significant debt in the digital infrastructure. The tool aims to draw attention to this issue and provide a way to acknowledge the people who hold up the projects we use daily.
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