Meeting Minutes 2017-07-11

Start 13:00; End: 13:45

CHAOSS BoF at Open Source Summit North America 2017

We have a 40 minute session on Monday, September 11 from 5:40pm to 6:20pm - http://sched.co/BCsP
What is our goal for the BoF and how do we want to structure the BoF?
We don't know how many people will show up but hope to have 10-15 attendees
We want to focus on the value metric “Growth - Maturity - Decline”
- Potentially ask participants to prioritize the activity metrics within the value metric
- Look at metric with regards to gaming and value
Include a short introduction to the CHAOSS group, but we only have 40 minutes
Goal: increase interest in our group and recruit more participants
- Maybe use the 40 minutes to identify priorities of the value metric and then have follow-up workshop the following days for a deep dive

CNCF defined a velocity metric
- Repository for the code: https://github.com/cncf/velocity
- Result from analysis: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hD-hXlVT60AGhGVifNn7nNo9oVMKnIoQ2kBNmx-YY8M/edit#gid=1381312348
- Very interesting approach
- We would need to know more about why CNCF created this metric and for what purpose
- The activity metric might not be very informative about how much value any project provides
  - The activity metrics, such as issues, can be gamed and are not necessarily reliable
- Comparing comparable communities will be one way to make sense of metrics
  - But the communities need to be of similar size, maturity state, type …
The recently joined libraries.io project has data on the OSS ecosystem, including upstream dependencies and downstream uses
The OpenStack community has experience with metrics and how they can be gamed
- Metrics might always be gamed, and we need to be open about it
- Maybe, we can provide with each metric a disclaimer about known ways that a metric has been gamed or misappropriated before
- When metrics are gamed, a hard reset and change of used metrics may be needed
- The gamability of metrics needs to be part of the CHAOSS metrics discussion
Metrics may not only be used to determine value or use, but can also be used by steering committees to steer activities supported by metrics

The University of Missouri and University of Nebraska at Omaha are working on a visualization of the 'Growth - Maturity - Decline' metric
A Google Summer of Code project with the SPDX group is looking at license health
The CII Best Practices Badge may be interested in our metrics work
- Potentially the best practices can inform work on the metrics
- The Badge might incorporate metrics as criteria
- We will connect with the CII group

(alphabetical by first name)