MindTouch announces most powerful voices in Open Source

Bangalore: MindTouch has come up with a list of 50 most influential and powerful voices in Open Source today. The Open Source community has many influential and important people. Yet some individuals tend to hold a bigger megaphone than the rest. Some of these people are well recognized while others exist in open source niches. But collectively they're all the most vocal, followed and re-posted open source commentators in the community today.

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"In compiling our ranking of the most powerful voices in open source, we struggled to find the appropriate metrics to measure both broadcast power and profundity. After some lengthy discussions, we decided to create a Most Powerful Voices (MPV) formula to use as a yardstick. We finally settled on seven key dimensions based on input from a number of third party sites," said Mark Fidelman on his blog on MindTouch.

MindTouch first set out to determine reach by examining the number of followers and buzz an individual has on sites like Twitter and Google. They then needed to determine how much impact an individual had with their followers and subscribers. They asked questions like: How often were they retweeted? How much buzz is created around their blog posts, tweets, and other messages? How often is the individual referenced in the blogosphere? Were they cited by influential people?

The MPV formula illustrates how much additional broadcast power an individual has versus an average active person (defined below). For example, Tim OReilly has 1.4 million times more broadcast power reach than the average person, while Mark Hinkle has a respectable 55 times more broadcast power than average.

Tim OReilly topped the list followed by Linus Torvalds and Chris Messina.