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CHAOSSweekly (September 30-October 4, 2024)

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2024 CHAOSS Community Survey is open! 

We encourage all past and present CHAOTICs to share their CHAOSS experiences with us so that we may better center diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in the project. This is the second time we have conducted this survey, and we look forward to hearing from you all! Whether you are a long-time CHAOTIC or a brand new face here, your input is extremely valuable! All answers are anonymous, so we encourage you to be candid and honest with your answers.

You can read more details about the survey or jump right to the survey itself.

This survey will be open until October 31, 2024.

Hacktoberfest is here!

If you’re interested in contributing to open source during the Hacktoberfest event, CHAOSS has some exciting opportunities for you! We will have issues and tasks in not only code, but also in technical writing, accessibility, and other areas. Join the #hacktoberfest-2024 slack channel and subscribe to the CHAOSS Hacktoberfest calendar to stay current with the planned events and initiatives.

 

New Working Group! UN SDGs and Open Source Community Metrics

At this year’s Open Source Summit EU, several CHAOTICS held an unconference to discuss the UN’s Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) and the role open source plays in achieving these goals. And as such, a new CHAOSS working group was born! If you are interested in discussing the ways open source health metrics can contribute to these goals, we’d love for you to join this group! The first meeting happened on October 2, so you can catch up with the minutes and notes here.

Meeting times and dates: Bi-weekly Wednesdays at 10:00 am US Central / Chicago time
Subscribe to the calendar here: https://ics.teamup.com/feed/ksk9vit7vig1w48j3s/13658871.ics
Minutes and agenda: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17VAYItNIw_i36mCUyBs1t9fEK_Ks1vjhOJFRfIA1CjM/edit

Thank you to David Lippert and Ruth Ikegah for leading this working group!

CHAOSScast Episode 93: Joint Podcast with Sustain OSS on CHAOSS Practitioner Guides

In this very special crossover episode of CHAOSScast, host Richard Littauer (Sustain) chats with CHAOTICS Dawn Foster, Luis Cañas Diaz, and Elizabeth Barron about the CHAOSS Practitioner Guides. From the podcast page:

The show delves into the purpose of these guides, which are designed to help open source projects interpret and utilize metrics to improve community health and sustainability. The guests explain the significance of metrics in open source projects, the challenges of defining and making them accessible, and how the guides can benefit different types of projects, from large corporations to individual developers. Topics covered include the background and format of the guides, specifics on the metrics discussed, and the practical applications and improvements these guides aim to facilitate.

You can listen now! https://podcast.chaoss.community/93 .

 

Tickets Available to All Things Open

The kind folks at All Things Open have offered CHAOTICS 5 Free Tickets to the conference! Once these are spoken for, interested people will still receive a 20% discount. The conference is October 27-29 in Raleigh, NC USA. To claim one of these tickets, reach out to Elizabeth Barron on Slack and she will provide you with a link. 

CHAOSS will also have a booth at the conference, so be sure to stop by and grab a sticker!

 

Help Us Celebrate our CHAOTIC of the Week: Alice Sowerby! 

black and white photo of a white woman with brown hair holding a cup of coffee

Alice Sowerby

A little about Alice

Hi, I’m Alice. I live near Bath in the UK. I enjoy making a difference, especially in communities with a mission and a heart. I enjoy getting to know people and giving time to help others 1:1.Over the years I have worked in a lot of different organisations and roles. To each new opportunity I bring curiosity, deep thinking and candour. It matters to me to be an anchor of psychological safety for those who have the least positional power, and I find myself working to make systems better, through influencing leaders and sponsoring those who need a chance to shine.I am currently self-employed, providing program management, management coaching, operational leadership, and thinking partnership for leaders.I enjoy dancing, spending time in nature, and learning languages.

What Alice works on at CHAOSS:

I produce the podcast, and often host it. I’ve also been on booth duty at Open Source Summit, as well as initiating the Comms working group to help coordinate our communication efforts.

Alice’s advice to newcomers:

Take time to get to know a community. A lot of open source happens asynchronously, and in places you might not normally hang out, like IRC and mailing lists. Try to find out whether there are meetings you can attend. You might have to attend a few before you get a feel for how you can help, and whether the community is for you. Remember that leadership looks different in open source, and you probably won’t find someone who can give you an assignment like you would when you have a boss!Once you get to know the community a bit, and make some connections, you should be able to see where you can get involved – and you can always ask. You really can craft your own path in open source and that takes some getting used to. It can be a very powerful and valuable realization.

You can connect with Alice here:
LinkedIn
Learn about her services here:
http://www.rosmarin.co.uk/
Website

Community Reminders:

Add your Community Contributions via an Issue on GitHub

We now have an easier way to add your community contribution to our community-contributions.md document. Simply open an issue using the CHAOSS Contribution Issue Template, and when you submit your issue, your contribution will be added.

Let the Comms Team Help You Spread Your News!

Are you giving a talk at an upcoming conference? Have you appeared on a recent podcast or been a guest contributor to a blog? Is your working group looking for volunteers for a project? If you have something CHAOSS related and you’d like to share it with the CHAOSS community (both internally and externally) then let the Communications Working Group know! We will be happy to share things on the official CHAOSS channels. Simply login to Slack and then go to the Comms Team Submission Form (or type the command /comms team submission form) to let us know what you’re working on.

Looking for Podcast Questions and Ideas for CHAOSScast

Alice Sowerby and the CHAOSScast team would love to hear your questions, comments, and ideas for new episodes of CHAOSScast! Feel free to send an email to podcast@chaoss.community with your thoughts.

CHAOTIC of the Week Nomination Form

Have you noticed a fellow CHAOTIC doing something amazing for CHAOSS? Has there been someone who is going above and beyond? If you’d like to nominate them for CHAOTIC of the Week, now you can! With our CHAOTIC of the Week feature, we like to celebrate their contributions to CHAOSS and enable our whole community to get to know them a little better. It’s a great way to show appreciation for our fellow CHAOTICs so don’t hesitate to nominate someone here.

Upcoming Meetings

Please refer to the CHAOSS Community Calendar for details on all upcoming meetings. Meetings should show in your local timezone, but you can convert to another time zone here. You can also subscribe to individual meetings on the CHAOSS Community Calendar by right-clicking the .ics file and adding to your calendar as a URL.

CHAOSSweekly (September 9-13, 2024)

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CHAOSS Meeting Change: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Working Group

The DEI Working Group has decided to switch to a bi-weekly cadence, to align with the format of the meetings of the other working groups within CHAOSS. The next meeting will be on September 25, 2024 at 10:00 am US Central. To keep up-to-date with future meeting changes, you can subscribe to the DEI Working Group calendar.

New Practitioner Guide Available: Security

The latest CHAOSS Practitioner Guide on Security provides a high-level overlook of how you might start to retrieve and interpret basic security data for your open source project. It speaks to these three metrics as a starting point:

Like the other Practitioner Guides, it is recommended that you read the Practitioner Guide Introduction first, for more context on how the guides are written and important information about collecting and interpreting data.

If you have feedback or suggestions for other guides, please refer to our Data Science repository on GitHub.

Call for Event Badgers – New Event Badger Orientation Sessions

If you are interested in becoming (or learning about) a DEI Event Badger, good news! We have scheduled two upcoming orientation/informational sessions. There is no obligation to becoming a Badger by participating in these events, but you will be given the option to join the Badger team at the end of the event. You can attend either of these sessions:

No prior CHAOSS experience is needed, and this is an easy and impactful way to begin contributing to CHAOSS.

New CHAOSS Slack Channel Available: Open Source Job Postings

For those who are hiring or seeking a job in open source, we now have a Slack channel dedicated for these kinds of posts. Feel free to join (and post!) in the #open-source-jobs channel.

CHAOSScast Episode 92: ISO Standards for Open Source Community Health Metrics

In this episode of CHAOSScast, host Alice Sowerby is joined by Sean Goggins, Georg Link, and guest Divya Mohan, to discuss the importance and process of establishing ISO standards for open source community health metrics. The panel talks about the basics of ISO standardization and how this can be of use for all those trying to define and track these types of metrics, which is of particular interest to the CHAOSS community! This is an incredibly educational discussion and you can listen in here: https://podcast.chaoss.community/92.

 

Open Source Summit EU CHAOTICs Talks

If you’ll be at Open Source Summit EU next week and you’d like to connect with some of our CHAOTICs, you can do so! We have a calendar of upcoming talks or you can see the full list of talks in our LinkedIn post.

Community Reminders:

Add your Community Contributions via an Issue on GitHub

We now have an easier way to add your community contribution to our community-contributions.md document. Simply open an issue using the CHAOSS Contribution Issue Template, and when you submit your issue, your contribution will be added.

Let the Comms Team Help You Spread Your News!

Are you giving a talk at an upcoming conference? Have you appeared on a recent podcast or been a guest contributor to a blog? Is your working group looking for volunteers for a project? If you have something CHAOSS related and you’d like to share it with the CHAOSS community (both internally and externally) then let the Communications Working Group know! We will be happy to share things on the official CHAOSS channels. Simply login to Slack and then go to the Comms Team Submission Form (or type the command /comms team submission form) to let us know what you’re working on.

Looking for Podcast Questions and Ideas for CHAOSScast

Alice Sowerby and the CHAOSScast team would love to hear your questions, comments, and ideas for new episodes of CHAOSScast! Feel free to send an email to podcast@chaoss.community with your thoughts.

CHAOTIC of the Week Nomination Form

Have you noticed a fellow CHAOTIC doing something amazing for CHAOSS? Has there been someone who is going above and beyond? If you’d like to nominate them for CHAOTIC of the Week, now you can! With our CHAOTIC of the Week feature, we like to celebrate their contributions to CHAOSS and enable our whole community to get to know them a little better. It’s a great way to show appreciation for our fellow CHAOTICs so don’t hesitate to nominate someone here.

Upcoming Meetings

Please refer to the CHAOSS Community Calendar for details on all upcoming meetings. Meetings should show in your local timezone, but you can convert to another time zone here. You can also subscribe to individual meetings on the CHAOSS Community Calendar by right-clicking the .ics file and adding to your calendar as a URL.

CHAOSSweekly (August 19-23, 2024)

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New on the CHAOSS Blog: Defining and Measuring the Value of Working in the Open: Key Takeaways from the workshop at “What’s Next for Open Source?”

Last month, CHAOTICs Georg Link, Venu Vardhan Reddy Tekula, and Stephanie Lieggi had the opportunity to present a workshop on the challenges of OSPOs and working in the open. In this latest blog post, Venu and Georg summarize the key findings and high points from the workshop. You can read all about this on the CHAOSS Blog.

CHAOSScast Episode 91: Red Hat OSPO: Contextual Community Analytics and the AI Hype Cycle

In this episode of CHAOSScast, host Matt Germonprez is joined by Red Hat’s Senior Data Scientist Cali Dolfi and Community Architect Josh Berkus to discuss their experiences in measuring and maintaining open source community health. They delve into their day-to-day roles, challenges, and key projects like Project Aspen, the importance of contextual metrics, and the impact of generative AI on their work. Also, they emphasize the importance of goal-oriented metrics and establishing repeatable processes in OSPOs. You can listen here: https://podcast.chaoss.community/91.

CHAOSS GitHub Sponsors Profile is Live!

After much work by the CHAOSS Finance Team, CHAOSS is now a part of the GitHub Sponsors community. If you would like to help us spread the word, or if you would like to become a GitHub sponsor you can do that on our GitHub Sponsor Profile Page. Thank you to all who helped get this set up, but especially to Georg Link who spearheaded this effort. 

Reminder: Request for Feedback on CoC Response and Reporting Documents

The CHAOSS Code of Conduct Team drafted documents related to incident response and reporting, and they are requesting feedback from the community:

Please provide your comments directly in the documents above. Your input is highly appreciated!

Reminder: Let the Comms Team Help You Spread Your News!

Are you giving a talk at an upcoming conference? Have you appeared on a recent podcast or been a guest contributor to a blog? Is your working group looking for volunteers for a project? If you have something CHAOSS related and you’d like to share it with the CHAOSS community (both internally and externally) then let the Communications Working Group know! We will be happy to share things on the official CHAOSS channels. Simply login to Slack and then go to the Comms Team Submission Form (or type the command /comms team submission form) to let us know what you’re working on.

Reminder: Looking for Podcast Questions and Ideas for CHAOSScast

Alice Sowerby and the CHAOSScast team would love to hear your questions, comments, and ideas for new episodes of CHAOSScast! Feel free to send an email to podcast@chaoss.community with your thoughts.

Reminder: CHAOTIC of the Week Nomination Form

Have you noticed a fellow CHAOTIC doing something amazing for CHAOSS? Has there been someone who is going above and beyond? If you’d like to nominate them for CHAOTIC of the Week, now you can! With our CHAOTIC of the Week feature, we like to celebrate their contributions to CHAOSS and enable our whole community to get to know them a little better. It’s a great way to show appreciation for our fellow CHAOTICs so don’t hesitate to nominate someone here.

Upcoming Meetings

Meeting time zones are listed below, but you can convert to your local time here. You can also subscribe to individual meetings on the CHAOSS Calendar by right-clicking the .ics file and adding to your calendar as a URL. For more information on any CHAOSS meeting (including Zoom link and links to meeting agendas), please refer to the CHAOSS calendar.

Tue Aug 27

9:00am – 9:50am CHAOSS Newcomer Hangout (US Central/Chicago)
10:00am – 10:50am CHAOSS Data Science Working Group (US Central/Chicago)
11:00am – 11:50am CHAOSS Weekly Community Call (US Central/Chicago)
1:00pm – 1:50pm CHAOSS App Ecosystem Working Group (US Central/Chicago)
 
Wed Aug 28
5:00am – 5:50am CHAOSS Africa Design Sync (WAT)
6:00am – 6:50am CHAOSS Africa Technical Writers (WAT)
10:00am – 10:50am CHAOSS DEI Working Group Meeting (US Central/Chicago)
 
Thu Aug 29
9:00am – 9:50am CHAOSS Africa Developers Sync (WAT)
10:00am – 10:50am CHAOSS Metrics Models Working Group (US Central/Chicago)
11:00am – 11:50am CHAOSS Metrics Development Working Group (US Central/Chicago)

CHAOSScon Africa 2023 Wrap

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epic moments, inspiring insights, and a whole lot of awesome!

CHAOSScon Africa 2023 Wrap

Let me tell you how the first ever CHAOSScon Africa went down. If you couldn’t make it to the event or did but need a refresher of the beautiful memories? This piece is for you. Ready? Hold my beer.

Sometime in May, plans for the first CHAOSSCon Africa started. Okay, wait, if you’re going to read this, you need to know what the project CHAOSS is about and why we hold these conferences. If you are new to CHAOSS, you should continue reading, otherwise, you can skip this part.

What is CHAOSS??In CHAOSS, we help open source communities understand the pulse/health of their communities. We do this by creating metrics and metrics models. To learn more about CHAOSS, kindly visit our website here.

Why CHAOSSCon??CHAOSSCon is a gathering of the CHAOSS community members and people fascinated by the project, where current happenings in the project are shared, its use cases and more. Interestingly, it’s not only for the CHAOSS community members. It’s also a gathering to learn about metrics and tools used by several open source projects, communities, and engineering teams to track and analyze their development activities, the community’s health, diversity, risk, and value.

CHAOSSCon was first held in Europe and co-located with FOSDEM in 2018. Since then, it had held in Europe and North America up until 2023. The first ever CHAOSSCon Africa was held, co-located with OSCA Fest in Lagos, Nigeria. You should see the list of past events from the CHAOSS community here.

…..on the real deal

Backstory on the planning and execution of CHAOSSCon Africa ?

When planning for CHAOSSCon Africa started, the organising committee had a few things in mind, bringing together developers, designers, community managers, and others interested in contributing or building open-source software to learn and connect with each other. We wanted to have an inclusive, diverse and memorable environment for attendees. And we achieved just that! See the post below for a quick highlight of the event.

Meetings around the event planning officially started on May 9. About a month into the event, and within that short time, we were able to secure funding from both GitHub and Bitergia. Secure the venue hall, and book an amazing food vendor that understood diversity and made the right meal for everyone. Shortlisted our speakers, and our keynote speakers said yes to our proposal. Got a great number of interested attendees. And all of these wouldn’t have been possible without the collaborative efforts of everyone; from the programs team co-led by Busayo and Ruth Ikegah who made sure the event ran smoothly, to the design team led by Kingsley who made sure designs effectively communicate the vision and expectations of the conference were ready and timely. To the communications-focused group led by Oluchi who made sure updates on CHAOSSCon Africa reached our audience and everyone was carried along in the buzz.

How did I forget Maryblessing (yours truly) who majorly was an errand girl for almost all the focused group ?. See the full list of the organising committee members on the event page here.

…..on community

As you already know, CHAOSS is big on community, in it our strength lies. We actively encouraged members to register and attend the conference, including members from other non-opensource communities. We gave out 100% discounted tickets to these communities to further encourage them, which in turn we hope got them excited about open source and not just CHAOSS as a project.

…..on learning

Remember I said we wanted attendees to experience true learning? Yes! We had the best keynote speakers grace the stage and amazing speakers who touched on different topics. Here are highlights of some of my favourite talks:

  1. Navigating the CHAOSS community: from beginner to Pro by Anita Ihuman our second keynote speaker, where she spoke on how new contributors in the CHAOSS community can get involved in the CHAOSS project using her experience as a case study. She touched on so many relatable stuff and for a moment it made me reflect on how far I have also come in the community looking back from the first day I joined.If you’re excited about what we do at CHAOSS, watch this session’s recap here. Please skip ahead to 1:15:42 of the video.
  2. Revitalize Your Community: Prioritizing Health and Well-Being for a Stronger, More Connected Community by Blessing Eloho. I was excited about this talk because it’s all we’re about in CHAOSS, and seeing someone preach more community health strategies was an absolute delight. The examples she gave were refreshing to hear and the points she made are truly essential.If you want to watch the recap, you can access it with the first link and skip ahead to 12:52 of the video.
  3. Lastly is The Open Source Launchpad: A Then & now look at tech careers by Justin Flory our first keynote speaker. It started off by defining what open source is, and I really loved his definition of open source at the conference. Justin’s talk touches on Tech careers and how open source fits into the puzzle. There’s an unending argument of if open source is free or not, and in this talk Justin let us know what the ‘free’ in open source is. Another point he talked about is what the future of building on ‘free’ stuff is.Again, if you want to watch the recap, click this link and skip ahead to 1:03:25 of the video.
  4. I also loved Brayan‘s talk but couldn’t get a lot while his session was ongoing but you should check the recap here. He spoke on Building Trust in AI: The Importance of Explainability in Open Source Projects.

…..on connecting

We had a few goals in mind, one of which is to connect opensourcerers together. When attendees leave the venue, what should they leave remembering? For us, we wanted that total experience package. Leaving nothing!

How do you feel looking at the above pictures? For me, I feel like going back to June 14, it was the best day.

…..on experience

Without a doubt, you could tell that CHAOSScon Africa 2023 was a blast.

I have made a carousel of some tweets from speakers and attendees, you should take a look below. You can see more of this by checking out the event hashtag #CHAOSSconAfrica2023.

lessons learned and future improvements

The conference went great, however, we had some setbacks. We sent out a post-event feedback form and I’ll make an attempt to analyse it.

  1. We asked that people rate their overall experience at CHAOSScon Africa. 83.3% of participants said it was excellent while 8.3% said it was average
  2. We asked if the event schedule and session information provided were clear and timely 50% said yes. 41.7% said it’s on average, while 8.3% said no.
  3. We asked if the sessions at the conference were relevant to their interests and expectations. 100% of participants said yes, it was.
  4. We asked if they had ample opportunities to network with other attendees and speakers. 41.7% said yes, definitely. 53.3% said yes, maybe.
  5. We asked that they give feedback on the conference venue and facilities. 66.7% of participants said it was great. 16.7% said it was good, while 8.3% said it was poor.
  6. We asked that they rate the quality and variety of food and refreshments provided. 75% of participants said it was excellent. 8.3% said it was good, another 8.3% said it was poor.
  7. To wrap it up, we asked if they would be interested in attending CHAOSScon Africa again in the future.100% of participants said yes, definitely!

This is an overview of all the efforts the different teams put in place to ensure the success of CHAOSScon and the results that emerged from this hard work.

Based on this feedback, there are a lot of things we’ll be looking into and making changes/improvements to for future events. The committee shows their heartfelt gratitude to everyone who filled out the feedback form, and if you haven’t yet, please use this link.

Wrapping up…

CHAOSScon Africa 2023 was a resounding success. We are thankful to all who made this a success, we appreciate our sponsors’ support and the dedication of every volunteer.

Without a doubt, the open source community in Africa is on an upward trajectory, accompanied by a surge of interest in open source technologies. The CHAOSS Africa community is committed to fostering a more sustainable future for open source technologies in Africa. In our pursuit of this goal, we are forging strategic partnerships and implementing comprehensive training programs. To stay tuned to these updates, do join the CHAOSS Project community.

Thank you for reading this far, we hope to see you soon!