Most know that Sherrie who, as Magento's Commuity Manager, runs the Magento Masters program, keeps a giant spreadsheet on which all community contributions are recognised throughout the year. By some magic formula at the end of the year it tabulates the input and produces the list of new Masters. So far no-one has come forward claiming to be able to reverse engineer it. As is common these days I decided to turn to AI to solve the question on how to become a Master.
Every year when the list is announced Sherrie includes a section on why someone was selected. With 3 years worth of input I thought it might be worthwhile checking for some trends. Artificial Intelligence might be overstretching the truth a bit but I thought this blog needed a higher buzzword density. In reality I have run a crude word frequency count instead of some fancy Natural Language Processing for each of the 3 Master categories and then manually joined common combinations and removed words of lesser significance.
And the results are:
Magento Movers (total selected so far 9)
| Word | Frequency |
|---|---|
| speaking engagements | 9 |
| contributions | 8 |
| community | 6 |
| events | 5 |
| github | 5 |
| ecosystem | 4 |
| extensive | 4 |
| educating | 4 |
| devdocs | 3 |
| helping | 3 |
| platform | 3 |
| magento-centric | 3 |
| organizing | 3 |
| user group | 3 |
Magento Mentors (total selected so far 21)
| Word | Frequency |
|---|---|
| community | 31 |
| contributions | 21 |
| consistently helping others | 18 |
| speaking engagements | 18 |
| stackexchange | 16 |
| github | 11 |
| organizing | 11 |
| events | 9 |
| moderating | 8 |
| magestackday | 8 |
| forums | 7 |
| platform | 7 |
| educating | 7 |
Magento Makers (total selected so far 30)
| Word | Frequency |
|---|---|
| contributions | 29 |
| speaking engagements | 18 |
| community | 16 |
| organizing | 15 |
| events | 10 |
| helping others | 10 |
| devdocs | 9 |
| forums | 8 |
| meet magento | 8 |
| sharing | 8 |
| user group | 7 |
| knowledge | 7 |
Across all Categories (total selected so far 60)
| Word | Frequency |
|---|---|
| contributions | 58 |
| community | 53 |
| speaking engagements | 43 |
| helping others | 34 |
| organizing | 29 |
| consistently | 24 |
| events | 24 |
| stackexchange | 23 |
| github | 22 |
| devdocs | 18 |
| educating | 16 |
| forums | 16 |
As a rough analysis, I would say, speaking engagements will help you in any category, but to be in the Movers category it's a requirement (100% of Movers had this mentioned). StackExchange scores particularly well in the Mentors section (note consistently helping others). And organisation of events like Meet Magento or on a smaller scale user groups is more commonly found in the Makers group. Al in all no surprises really. It's a top contributor program and there are lots of ways to contribute in the Magento ecosystem.