Our research group at the University of Michigan has been working on the "related modules" block for Drupal.org for more than 2 years now. We have published 2 papers on this project so far:

1) Assessment of Conversation Co-mentions as a Resource for Software Module Recommendation. Will be presented at ACM Recommender System Conference'09

2) Conversation Pivots and Double Pivots. Presented at ACM Computer Human Interaction Conference'08

In short, we have tuned the algorithm to recommend related modules based on conversation co-mentions, and showed that it works better than recommendation based on module co-installation data, and works as good as ApacheSolr More Like This module.

Our next steps are:

First, we'll further improve the quality of "related modules" block by using the clickthrough data on the recommended links. Followup details will be at http://drupal.org/node/479812

Then, we'll migrate the "related conversations" block to be based on ApacheSolr. Followup details will be at http://drupal.org/node/511514

I'm looking forward to making more contributions to Drupal.org!

Finally, I'd like to thank Gerhard Killesreiter (killes) and Kieran Lal (amazon) at Drupal.org for their support.

http://michiza.com/sites/default/files/files/recsys09.pdfhttp://michiza.com/sites/default/files/files/chi08.pdf