Thanks to you both for the feedback, it's much appreciated.
Indeed the issue tracker is an invaluable source of information, however my understanding is that it will only show information from Github, and at present only related to the CMS. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong here. The stats do show information from the issue tracker system such as testing which I don't believe is available via Github however I am not well versed in the technicalities here.
As a bit of background, the Dashboard pulls in from multiple repositories, including the Framework and some historical sources which are no longer used, to give an 'all time' overview. You can view the data sources that are being imported here:
https://dashboard.joomla.org/its-repos.html.
The Dashboard is not only focused on code, it also pulls in information from our Documentation project, which you can view here:
https://dashboard.joomla.org/wiki.html. This gives a nice overview of contributors to docs.joomla.org over time, and allows the community to see different areas of contribution. It's entirely feasible we could pull in information from the volunteers portal, glip etc providing that the data sets are accessible and can be imported in an appropriate format.
There is also the potential of including further data sources such as the forums and mailing lists, however these were not supported 'out of the box' and would require further development from us to implement, as well as some logistical considerations - for example the sheer size of the data dumps which would come from the forum. When we were planning the dashboard we had discussions with the forum representatives on CLT about how this might be achieved but it was felt at the time it would not be feasible.
We also flagged that the Github imports don't show test information in the way that our project works, and that was something that would be very beneficial to be displayed alongside all the various metrics that are currently being presented. This could feasibly come in from the issue tracker if the information can be exposed in such a way that it can be imported by the tools that are being used. Again this side of things is a bit beyond my personal level of technical knowledge but I would really appreciate a discussion about how that could be achieved, as I agree with you Brian that this information is just as relevant as issues being submitted, commits being merged and PR's being made.
The dashboard in its present form is showing only a small subset of visualisation options as a starting point. The metrics we are displaying were agreed by the leadership teams during our joint summit as a useful dataset from which we could start, the idea being that we can iteratively add more metrics based on what the community feels would be helpful to know. If there are specific metrics that are of interest we can look at adding those to the dashboard at any point in the future providing of course that the data sources exist.
It would be great to have feedback on what metrics you feel would be helpful to be displayed, and what data sources could be imported. If you'd like to help with contributing then that would also be really great!
Thanks again for taking the time to respond!
Ruth