Where an ecosystem ends, and the headline number that moves with it
Keep Base's entry current in the dataset behind everyone's developer-count charts.
Electric Capital’s ecosystem taxonomy is TOML: which repositories and organisations belong to which ecosystem, and which ecosystems nest inside others. It is the input to the developer reports that get cited constantly.
The whole thing turns on boundary definition, which is not clerical. Does a Base repository belong to Base, to Optimism because Base is an OP Stack chain, to both, or to neither because it is an application that happens to deploy there? Sub-ecosystem nesting means a repo counted in a child is counted upward into the parent too, so one nesting decision moves two headline numbers.
Which is the thing worth naming: editing a metadata file moves a published statistic, and nothing in the workflow signals it. A pull request adding twenty repositories looks like housekeeping and changes a chart someone will screenshot in a funding deck. Monorepos and forks are the recurring hard cases, and the metadata cannot express the difference between a fork with real independent work and a fork that is a snapshot.
The 2024 first-half maintenance pass for Base, merged as #1403.