Is your open source project sustainable? Is it keeping up with its pull requests? What are the response times? Leave it to the open source community to create tools for assessing the risk of open source projects, based on, well, open source. Understanding the health of a particular project can help individual contributors and sponsoring companies gauge their interest and ultimately, their investment.
Dawn Foster, an open source community leader for more than 20 years, has a penchant for measuring the value of open source projects for the community at large and specifically for the companies supporting them. Gathering data and availing metrics that pinpoint project value allow for clear ties to a company’s business goals.
Enter Linux Foundation’s Community Health Analytics Open Source Software Project (CHAOSS). Companies want to know which communities and software to engage with, communicate the impact the organization has on the community, and evaluate the work of their employees within open source.
The CHAOSS project welcomes participants not only in terms of code contributors, but also anyone who can help define metrics such as risk factors, diversity/inclusion, organizational affiliation.
Since joining VMware with the Pivotal acquisition, Dawn writes Python scripts using Auger’s robust API to reach into optimized databases and create metrics dashboards for some of VMware’s open source projects. Augur is a flask web application, python library and REST server that presents metrics on open source software development project health and sustainability. It is a prototyped implementation of the CHAOSS Project with focus on making sense of data using human centered data science strategies.
Listen to Dawn talk about what drives her interest in this area of open source and how she is applying it today at VMware.
