Contribution tracking
without self-report.
Group work runs on a broken assumption: that everyone will honestly log what they did. Free-Rider Tracker reads what actually happened — from the tools your team already uses.
Read-only OAuth scopes only · No manual logging · One-time account link
Self-report is the load-bearing weakness.
Group work — in classrooms, hackathons, and workplaces — runs on one quiet assumption: that every member will honestly report what they contributed. That assumption fails constantly.
A survey of 205 students across an Australian university found free-riding was the single greatest concern students raised about group work, across every discipline. It is not a rare edge case.
Peer Evaluation Forms
Teammates rate each other once, at the end. Subjective, gameable with reciprocal high ratings, and too late to fix anything.
Task Boards (Trello / Jira)
Requires everyone to remember to log work — the exact self-report step free-riders skip.
Status Check-in Bots
A Slack bot pings members to report progress. Adds a new habit — exactly the kind of friction that gets ignored first.
Instructor Spot-checks
Doesn't scale past a handful of teams, and only samples a moment in time.
The cost isn't just fairness on paper. Students report receiving the same grade as teammates who produced a fraction of the output. The students most likely to free-ride are also the least likely to be caught — because agreeableness and conscientiousness are significant negative predictors of social loafing, traits self-report systems are blind to.
Observe, don't ask.
Instead of asking anyone to log, report, or check in, Free-Rider Tracker reconstructs true contribution from records that already exist as a side effect of doing the work. Members link their accounts once; from that point on, the system observes rather than asks.
| Dimension | Existing Tools | Free-Rider Tracker |
|---|---|---|
| Data source | Self-report — forms, check-ins, task boards | Passive activity generated by real work (commits, doc edits, timestamps) |
| Adoption friction | High — a new habit every member must keep | Near zero — nothing new to log; reads what already exists |
| Timing | End-of-project or periodic snapshots | Continuous — reconstructed at any point from the full history |
| Bias | Subjective, socially influenced, reciprocity-gameable | Objective and independently verifiable from source platforms |
| Design assumption | Assumes people will self-report honestly | Assumes they won't — and designs around that instead |
Four steps. Then step back.
The entire product is designed around a single constraint: never ask anyone to do anything they wouldn't do anyway.
Link your accounts
Connect GitHub, Figma, and/or Google Docs once. Under 60 seconds per source. Nothing to configure, no docs required.
Work exactly as you normally do
Commit code, edit designs, revise documents. Free-Rider Tracker reads these activity trails automatically — no new habit introduced.
Group forms automatically
When a submission points at a shared repo, Figma file, or Google Doc, the group is created from contributors/editors. No invite step needed.
Get the Group Insight Report
Contribution % per member, an activity timeline, and plain-language insights — rendered in under 5 seconds. Objective. Independently verifiable.
Absolute clarity,
mathematically derived.
The frictionless architecture that makes Free-Rider Tracker fundamentally un-cheatable.
Passive Ingestion
Reads native source activity from GitHub, Figma, and Docs. Zero manual check-ins required.
Source Adapter Architecture
Every provider — GitHub, Figma, Google Docs — plugs into the same two-function contract: fetchRawActivity and normalize. Adding a new source is a ~40-line adapter file, not a new pipeline.
Read-only by Design
We request the minimum possible OAuth scopes across all providers. We read metadata — timestamps, diff sizes, edit counts — never file contents. Linking is opt-in and revocable.
Zero Ongoing Input
No screen in the product ever asks a member to manually log or rate work. Once accounts are linked, contribution is measured automatically at every submission.
Per-source Breakdown
Combining code commits with design versions and doc revisions in one blended score is misleading. Free-Rider Tracker shows each source's share separately so nothing is hidden.
Individual Profiles
Every member gets a verified contribution history reusable as a portfolio record — across every group they've been a part of.
Activity Timeline
See not just who contributed, but when. Identify who carried the project in its final hours versus who drove it throughout — plain language, no jargon.
One adapter pattern.
Three sources, one report.
Every provider plugs into the same interface. Adding Figma or Google Docs isn't a new pipeline — it's a new ~40-line adapter file plugged into a pipeline that already exists.
GitHub
Commits, lines changed, files touched per member via REST API and webhook ingestion.
- Commits
- Lines changed
- Files touched
- Contributor detection
Figma
File version history and edits per member via the Figma API.
- File versions
- Edits per user
- Timestamps
- Auto-detected group
Google Docs
Revision history per member via the Drive API.
- Revision history
- Editor attribution
- Timestamps
- Doc-based grouping