About

What this is

You are reading a survey, not a store. We ran recorded search campaigns — one per task a founder actually faces — and each campaign kept a ledger of what it screened and what it admitted. Those admissions are the entries here, mapped for founders, founding teams and early operators, with dates on everything. This is a method-curated survey. Not an audit, not an endorsement.

The rules

Three rules run this site, and you can check each one. We do not rank anything. Order is category and name, wherever you look. We never repeat what a repository says about itself; our descriptions are our own words, labeled as drafts until reviewed. And every coverage claim is quoted from its campaign word for word — never upgraded. A founder tool earns trust by naming the case it gets wrong. We put the misses on the record next to the hits.

Where entries come from

A campaign freezes its question before it searches. Screening follows written rules. Whatever survives lands in a ledger with its evidence, because a claim needs a source that can be checked. Metrics come from one dated snapshot of the public GitHub API, hashed at capture (its coverage and limits are on the data card). What the hash covers — and what it cannot prove — is spelled out on the methodology page.

The research question

Watch curated relevance and crowd popularity long enough and you can ask which one leads. That is the study behind this site: how do method-curated relevance and community popularity co-evolve in open-source practice ecosystems? One early signal, from the full campaign ledgers rather than the entries shown here: the repository those ledgers cite most often has zero stars. The full ledger corpus is not yet published; the weekly design exists to test that contrast instead of assuming it. The database beneath all of this is under a licensing review and is intended to be opened.

Who runs this

A small research effort, unaffiliated: not sponsored, reviewed or endorsed by any institution. Nobody paid to be listed. There is no submission form and no public inbox yet; a contact route ships when the licensing review lands. Until then, if you think we missed something, the methodology page shows how a campaign would find it.

Art, rights, and reuse

The plates are archival botanical illustration, credited where they appear and in full on the credits page. Our text is reusable with attribution. Each repository stays under its own license, named on its entry. Quote pages freely; the data layer's terms sit on the license page while the review is open.

The standard · Provenance and caveats · Image credits · License and citation