Update Sept 2016 Github has changed their user front pages, moving a little toward this direction.

As submitted to Github:

I advocate to scientist/engineering colleagues and at the legislative level to encourage collaborative open-source development on everything from smart transportation and robotics to climate change modeling and data analysis.

The effort to sunshine code out of dusty forgotten hard drives and into the light would be significantly enhanced if Github would by default or prominently, easily selectable option show repo traffic (views, clones, download zip). The civic and scientific value of this change could be surprising, and is seemingly something a couple talented interns could prototype in a few weeks.

Github, please help us make a better world of open code by incentivizing authors via easy intuitive plots of repo traffic.