Fathoming Software Evangelists with the D-Index

The increased importance represented by open-source and crowd-sourced software developers and software development in general, inspired us to consider the following dilemma: can we "compute" virtuous software developers? The D-Index is our preliminary attempt. Essentially, the D-Index meaningfully equates several indicators for the virtues of a developer, such as, contributed code, its quality, mentoring in online learning communities, community engagement. Our preliminary evaluation of the index suggests that establishing the virtues for certain developers eases the identification of software "evangelists", key success enablers for software communities.