Activity Reports

Activity Reports#

QuantEcon is adopting semi-automation workflows that summarise activity across the organization and draft content for review. These are deliberately human-in-the-loop: the automation generates a report, an issue, or a draft pull request, and a maintainer reviews (and edits) it before anything is published. Nothing is auto-published.

The automation lives in:

QuantEcon/reports-activity

The repository ships a GitHub Action (action.yml) wrapping an org-agnostic generate-report.sh engine, plus the scheduled workflows described below. There are two tracks built on the same engine — an internal reporting track and a public news track. The repository README and docs/ hold the full operational detail.

What it tracks#

For every repository in the organization, over a chosen time window, the engine collects:

Open issues (snapshot) and issues opened / closed in the period
Pull requests opened / merged in the period
Direct commits and releases
Per-repository activity summaries, with external repositories optionally tracked

Each run also emits a structured report-data.json for downstream tooling, and can produce a curated highlights.md (theme-grouped notable items, a noise rollup, and a split between software releases and lecture publishes).

Internal status reports#

These cover all organization activity (including internal repositories) and record the results inside the reports-activity repository.

Workflow	Cadence	Output
`weekly-report.yml`	Weekly (Sun 08:00 UTC)	Opens an issue in `reports-activity` with the `status-report` label
`monthly-report.yml`	Monthly (1st, 06:00 UTC)	Opens a PR archiving `reports/<YYYY-MM>-monthly/`

Public news drafts#

A separate public-only track drafts posts for quantecon.org/news and opens them as a draft pull request against QuantEcon/website for editorial review — news is public and must never publish automatically. Because this track is public-only it structurally cannot read private org repositories, so private activity can never reach a public draft.

Workflow	Cadence	Output
`news-weekly.yml`	Weekly (Sun 08:55 UTC)	Draft PR to `QuantEcon/website` covering lecture/book publishes and quantecon.org changes
`news-watch.yml`	Daily	Draft PR announcing any library release from the previous day

Lecture and book posts are publish-anchored — a site appears only in the period it actually cut a publish-* release (i.e. went live), with the updated material linked underneath. Library releases are treated as events and picked up by the daily watcher rather than held for the weekly digest.

LLM narratives#

Both tracks can use Claude to draft short, human-readable summaries (the report highlights narrative and the per-site news summaries). This requires an organization ANTHROPIC_API_KEY. For the internal reports the narrative is optional — highlights still render without it. For the news track it is required (--require-llm): if the key is missing or unusable the drafter writes nothing and the workflow opens an alert issue rather than drafting a rough, non-LLM fallback post.

Authentication#

Each workflow uses the least-privilege credential it needs, so scopes stay minimal:

Reading private org repos (internal track) uses a short-lived token minted from an org-owned GitHub App with read-only Contents / Metadata / Pull requests access.
Posting back into reports-activity (the weekly issue, the monthly PR) uses the default repo-scoped GITHUB_TOKEN.
Opening the website PR (news track) uses a separate App installed on QuantEcon/website only, with Contents + Pull requests: write.