Q1 2026 was a banner quarter for open source collaboration, as shown by the GitHub Innovation Graph’s economy collaborators metric, part of the latest data release. Outbound collaboration, defined as the sum of git pushes and pull requests sent from developers in one economy to public repositories in another economy, grew by 16% quarter-over-quarter from Q4 2025 to Q1 2026.
That’s the second highest quarter-over-quarter growth rate we’ve seen since 2020. The highest was in Q2 2020, with a 21% growth rate, when many of us suddenly and collectively decided to use our computers more.
In third place was Q1 2023, with a 9% growth rate. This was the first quarter after a research lab blogged about a new website they made, and they enticed users to sign up and file bug reports by offering a chance to win up to $500 in API credits. Evidently, sweepstakes are unreasonably effective motivators.
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