Episode 79: The Mechanics of CHAOSS: A Deep Dive into Open Source Community Health Analytics

CHAOSScast

Thank you to the folks at Sustain for providing the hosting account for CHAOSSCast!

In this collaboration between the CHAOSS Cast and Mechanical Ink podcasts, hosts Dawn Foster and Schalk Neethling are joined by guests Daniel Izquierdo and Sean Goggins to discuss open source community health metrics.

The focus is on providing an overview of two projects under the CHAOSS (Community Health Analytics for Open Source Software) umbrella - GrimoireLab and Augur. These open source tools gather data from diverse sources and analyze it to provide insights into open-source community health.

The episode brings together two fascinating open source projects - GrimoireLab and Augur - that aim to provide insights into the health of open-source software communities. By gathering data from various platforms and channels, and analyzing contributor activity, issues, pull requests, and conversations, these projects shine a light on the inner workings of open-source projects.

You have Sean Goggins, a university researcher who co-created Augur to dissect community interactions at scale. Then you have Daniel Izquierdo whose startup Bitergia built GrimoireLab to offer open source analytics as a service. Both share insightful stories on the evolving landscape of inner source and metrics-driven community management. It's a great listen for anyone involved in running open-source projects or communities.

Beyond project leads, the conversation also touches on why understanding community health is vital today for enterprise adopters to track their dependencies and influence. And as Dawn Foster from CHAOSS chips in, you get an important reminder to not get carried away chasing tools without clarity on what specific questions you want answered from the underlying data.

Overall, a stimulating mix of history and future direction on using metrics to guide open-source communities toward greater sustainability.
Guests

• Daniel Izquierdo: Co-founder and CEO of Bitergia, co-founder of CHAOSS, President of InnerSource Commons
• Sean Goggins: Professor of Computer Science at the University of Missouri, maintainer of Augur software package in CHAOSS

Key Topics Discussed

• Origins and goals of the CHAOSS project
• Overview of GrimoireLab
• Overview of Augur
• Supporting analysis across diverse data sources
• Focus areas and roadmaps
• Getting involved in the projects

Links Mentioned

• CHAOSS (chaoss.community)
• GrimoireLab (grimoirelab.github.io)
• Augur (augurlabs.io)
• Cauldron instance (cauldron.io)
• Public Augur instance (metrics.chaoss.io)
• OSS Compass (oss.compass.community)

Special Guest: Schalk Neethling.

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