1. A computer system, comprising: a transceiver operable to transmit and receive communications over at least a portion of a network; and a processor cooperatively operable with the transceiver, and configured to facilitate: collecting and storing information of a released version of a software project that uses a plurality of software artifacts, the information for the software project including: a project identifier for the project, artifact identifiers for all of the plurality of artifacts used by the project, information about the temporal version for all of the plurality of software artifacts used by the project, and contact information for a user of the software project; collecting, from a software repository by communication over the transceiver, metadata associated with the plurality of software artifacts, the metadata for each of the plurality of software artifacts including: information identifying the respective artifact, and user information indicative of an expected effectiveness of the respective artifact for its intended use; periodically monitoring the metadata to determine whether there has been any actionable change in the metadata associated with the plurality of software artifacts; and notifying the user of the software project via the transceiver using the contact information if it is determined that there has been an actionable change in the metadata associated with the plurality of software artifacts, wherein the user information includes user-provided ranking information specific to the respective artifact obtained from a community of users to which the user belongs, and wherein the community of users to which the user belongs is determined by a profile of the user or the user project to which the user belongs as indicated by the profile of the user.