KDEPIM: Any More Guesses?

Yesterday I posed a somewhat cryptic question: what happened in KDEPIM in late 2010 that might have caused such a dramatic spike in an unnamed (but real) metric? I want to leave the conversation running a little bit longer. So here is some further food for thought, to keep you guessing...

Some things to note:

• The new metric is developer count... the number of unique contributors to KDEPIM each month;
• Careful! These two plots are not on the same scale. Note the two different Y-axis scales. Mystery plot on the left, developer count on the right;
• It may (or may not) be important that the huge spike in the mystery metric just so happens to be followed by a significant (for some definition of significant) drop in developer count. Again... I'm not going to tell you what the mystery metric is, but I will say that, in this case, causality is not out of the question. The huge spike in the mystery metric arguably, in some small way, might have contributed to the later drop in developers.

I'm now going to leave this "out there" for a day or two before getting back to it. This buys you guys some time to come up with some more suggestions as to what the mystery metric might be (and what caused the spike in it).

It also buys me some time to find out (for definite) what caused the spike... After all, I do know what the mystery metric is!

In Conclusion

Yes, I do know that the previously-red plot is now green and the new plot is red. One day I will master GNUPlot.