Poster: Forks Insight: Providing an Overview of GitHub Forks

Fork-based development allows developers to start development from existing software repository by copying the code files. However, when the number of forks grows, contributions are not always visible to others, unless an explicit merge-back attempt is made. To solve this problem, we implemented Forks Insight (www.forks-insight.com) to help developers get an overview of forks on GitHub. The current release version focuses on simple analytics for the high level overview which is lightweight, scalable and practical. It has a user-friendly interactive web interface with features like searching and tagging.