This is an old revision of the document!
The CHAOSS (Community Health Analytics for OSS) Metrics Committee defines implementation-agnostic metrics for assessing open source communities' health and sustainability. The CHAOSS Metrics Committee goals are to establish implementation-agnostic metrics for measuring community activity, contributions, and health; and optionally produce standardized metric exchange formats, detailed use cases, models, or recommendations to analyze specific issues in the industry/OSS world.
All contributions to implementation-agnostic metrics and standards, including associated scripts, SQL statements, and documentation, will be received and made available under the MIT License (https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT).
As a community, we will initially focus on four OSS project metrics. The initial four metrics are complex, value-oriented metrics that explain a current state of CHAOSS member needs. The four metrics, and any metric thereafter, must not constructed in ways that incentivize problem behaviors within a community. The complex metrics are constructed from one or more activity metrics. Refer to our list of activity metrics for descriptions of activity metrics.
If, as a community, we should be initially focusing on a different set of metrics, post your comments to the mail list. This list is flexible and expected to grow over time. We can definitely change our focus as the community sees fit.
Diversity and Inclusion are known to challenge unchecked assumptions and lead to more open and fair collaboration practices.
Organizational diversity indicates the breadth of support an OSS community has by different organizations.
Informed by activity metrics: Bus Factor, Contribution Diversity, Contributor Breadth, Contributor Diversity, Decision Distribution, Distribution of Work
Geographic Diversity indicates the global reach and inclusion of an OSS community.
Informed by activity metrics: Commit Bias (by region), Contributor Breadth, Contributor Diversity, Decision Distribution, Language Bias, Unity, Use of Acronym, User Groups (by country)
An OSS community goes has states: growth, maturity, and decline. The state that a community is in may prove important when evaluating both across and within community concerns.
Informed by activity metrics: Age of Community, Apache Maturity Model, CII Best Practices Badge, Community Activity, Contribution Acceptance, Contribution Age, Contributor Activity, Contributors, Dependency Depth, Forks, Gatherings, Issue Response Rate, Issues submitted/closed, Onion Layers, Project Life Cycle, Relative Activity, Release Maturity, Release Velocity, Roadmap, Test Coverage, Time to Contributor, Update Rate, Update Regularity, User Groups
This informs how much risk an OSS community might pose. The evaluation of risk depends on situation and purpose.
License Risk indicates the licenses used by an OSS community, how well license declarations are provided throughout all files and whether potential license conflicts arise.
Informed by activity metrics: All Licenses, License Declared, License Conflicts, License Count, License Coverage
Vulnerability Risk indicates known vulnerabilities and how the community responds.
Informed by activity metrics: Bug Age, Bugs after Release, Known Vulnerabilities, Release Note Completeness
Many OSS communities rely on and are used in other open source software, creating interdependence throughout an OSS ecosystem.
Upstream Reliance informs how much an OSS community relies on other open source software.
Informed by activity metrics: Dependency Depth
Downstream Use informs how many other OSS communities rely on the focal community.
Informed by activity metrics: Dependency Depth
The CHAOSS Project and the Metrics Committee is newly formed. See meeting minutes for an update on the governance document. The conversation about defining metrics is just beginning and we will continuously update the wiki based on the discussions we have.
The conversation about metrics is occurring on our mail list and at our monthly phone calls.
The CHAOSS Metrics Committee is an open source project and welcomes new contributors.
All contributions to implementation-agnostic metrics and standards, including associated scripts, SQL statements, and documentation, will be received and made available under the MIT License (https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT).
The mail list is the place for discussion and open for anyone to join.
This Wiki is the place for the metrics.
Next call: Tuesday, September 5th, 2017
Monthly, every first Tuesday from 13:00 to 13:50 (US Central Time)
Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://unomaha.zoom.us/j/609939109
Or Telephone:
Dial: +1 408 638 0968 (US Toll) or +1 646 558 8656 (US Toll) or International numbers
Meeting ID: 609 939 109