Prebid Unlocks Deep Insights into Open Source Project Health and Community Engagement with Keypup

About Prebid

Prebid is a pivotal organization in the Ad Tech industry, dedicated to fostering fair, transparent, and efficient open-source header bidding solutions. With a globally distributed software engineering organization of around 1000 contributors (internally and externally), Prebid plays a crucial role in shaping the future of programmatic advertising by providing tools and standards that benefit publishers, advertisers, and the entire ecosystem.

Industry: Ad Tech

Engineering Organization Size: Approximately 1000 contributors (internal and external)

About Zach Savishinsky

Zach Savishinsky is the Fractional Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Prebid. In his role, Zach is responsible for the technological vision and strategy, overseeing the development and health of Prebid's extensive open-source projects. He is focused on understanding and enhancing community engagement and ensuring the long-term viability and success of their widely adopted solutions.

The Challenge: Gaining Visibility into Project Health and Community Engagement

Prebid faced a common but complex challenge for organizations managing large-scale, volunteer-driven open-source projects. With development distributed across many PMC (Project Management Committee) areas, each responsible for multiple repositories, Prebid lacked a unified way to evaluate overall project health and community dynamics. "Each PMC is led by a chair and co-chair and made up by a group of volunteers, all member companies of the organization", Zach explains. "The contributions of these volunteers in developing and enhancing the product have been extraordinary."

However, holistic visibility into engagement trends and contribution patterns wasn’t readily available—and it wasn’t something that needed to be top of mind for contributors. This created a gap in understanding how the community as a whole was interacting with the projects. Prebid needed a solution that could aggregate GitHub data and surface actionable insights beyond basic contribution counts.

Why Keypup?

Prebid evaluated multiple options but struggled to find a tool that truly captured the depth and complexity of their open-source ecosystem. “We evaluated other products, one for instance only provided a way to score contributions, not track project health,” Zach notes.

Keypup stood out by delivering the nuanced insights they needed. “Keypup allowed us to extract a lot of information from GitHub that would not be easily accessible otherwise,” Zach shares.

Its ability to go beyond surface-level metrics and dive into detailed engagement patterns was a major differentiator.

The Keypup Experience: Quick Setup and Collaborative Support

Getting started with Keypup was refreshingly straightforward. “It was a matter of clicking a couple of buttons, allowing access to GitHub, and we were essentially ready to go,” Zach recalls.

Building out initial proof-of-concept dashboards to evaluate the product was also relatively easy.This smooth start paved the way for an ongoing refinement process. Prebid continues to iterate based on internal feedback, determining which insights are most valuable and which are less relevant for their needs.

A highlight of the experience has been the support and collaboration with the Keypup team. “The support team has been a pleasure to work with,” says Zach. “Some of my feedback, like the Syntax Highlighting feature, a small but nice-to-have addition, was incorporated in future releases.” Zach also emphasized the responsiveness and accessibility of the team.

“The ability to get on a call was crucial. Our Product Expert and I had several calls where we walked through all of the dashboards I created, one by one. We analyzed the underlying queries, did a spot QA check on them, and discussed other ways to access the data that might be more effective. This has been very helpful in unlocking new possibilities to use the product and truly understand its potential.”

This highlights Keypup's commitment to partnership and customer-driven development.

Real Benefits: Clarity, Proactivity, and Empowerment

Although Prebid is still expanding its use of Keypup, the early impact is already significant.

Keypup has enabled:

• Understanding Community Engagement Dynamics: “A big benefit is we now see what our engagement looks like between members and non-members of our organization,” Zach states. “This helps us better understand our customers and contributors.” That visibility is key in a decentralized open-source ecosystem.
• Strategic Conversations with Stakeholders: With clearer insights, Prebid can now have more informed conversations. When engagement is high from non-member organizations, Prebid can proactively reach out to understand their needs and challenges in the marketplace, and explore how Prebid can support their goals. Similarly, when engagement is low among existing stakeholders, it’s a chance to assess what’s working and where additional alignment or support may be needed.
• A Foundation for Informed Oversight: “Having access to engineering velocity gives me a clearer picture of what’s working well, and what isn’t, within the team,” Zach explains. “This allows me to be more involved where support is needed, while empowering areas that are performing well to continue working fairly autonomously.” For Prebid, this data provides not only operational insights but also strategic guidance.
• A Vision for Broader Community Engagement: Looking ahead, Prebid plans to showcase its open-source activity publicly. “One thing I am planning to do with Keypup is to embed it on our website so that we can have a live scoreboard of engagement in our projects, to help facilitate additional contributions.”

Looking Forward

Prebid is highly satisfied with the Keypup platform and excited about how it can continue to uncover the right insights. “We highly recommend it if you are trying to get a hold of what's happening in your GitHub repos, especially if you're in the open-source world and have what seems to be an unmanageable amount of contributors,” Zach concludes.

Prebid’s experience shows that with the right tools and the right support, it’s possible to bring clarity to even the most distributed and dynamic software projects, and to do so in a way that amplifies both community and strategic value.

Quote

"Keypup has given us much-needed visibility into what’s happening across our GitHub repositories, particularly around engagement from contributors, both members and non-members of our organization. These insights are helping us better understand how our community interacts with our projects and where we can provide more support or alignment."