In 2020 we started tracking episode contributions for our podcast at the community project: https://www.drupal.org/project/talkingdrupal. Adding our backlog of contributions put the three regular hosts in the top 20 contributors to Drupal for the year!
I've reblogged a portion of Dries' write-up below, but the whole post is worth a read!
Who sponsors Drupal development? (2020-2021 edition)
Who are Drupal's top individual contributors?
The top 30 individual contributors between July 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021 are:
For the weighted ranking, I weighed each credit based on the adoption of the project the credit is attributed to. For example, each contribution credit to Drupal Core is given a weight of 10, because Drupal Core has about 1 million active installations. Credits to the Webform module, which has over 450,000 installations, get a weight of 4.5. And credits to Drupal's Commerce project get 0.5 points, as it is installed on around 50,000 sites.
The weighting algorithm also makes adjustments for Drupal's strategic initiatives. Strategic initiatives get a weight of 10, the highest possible score, regardless of whether these are being developed in Drupal Core's Git repository or in a sandbox on Drupal.org.
The idea is that these weights capture the end user impact of each contribution, but also act as a proxy for the effort required to get a change committed. Getting a change accepted in Drupal Core is both more difficult and more impactful than getting a change accepted to a much smaller, contributed project.
This weighting is far from perfect, but so is the unweighted view. For code contributions, the weighted chart may be more accurate than a purely unweighted approach. I included both charts:
No matter how you look at the data, all of these individuals put an incredible amount of time and effort into Drupal.
It's important to recognize that most of the top contributors are sponsored by an organization. We value the organizations that sponsor these remarkable individuals. Without their support, it could be more challenging for these individuals to contribute.
Special thanks to Tim Lehnen, CTO at the Drupal Association, for supporting me during my research.