CHAOSS Blog

If you would like to write an article for our blog, please reach out to our community manager – Elizabeth Barron.

CHAOSS Community 2022 in Review

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Every year seems like a big year for CHAOSS, and this year was no exception. Here are some of the milestones we reached in 2022:

We are so incredibly grateful to all those who have attended community and working group meetings, contributed code, created design assets, participated in our community survey, greeted newcomers in Slack, helped review old metrics, improved our documentation, offered suggestions, helped another Chaotic find an answer, or any of the myriad of other ways our contributors have participated in the global CHAOSS community.  You are what makes CHAOSS move forward and we couldn’t do much without the strength of our community. Here’s to an amazing 2023— our future has never looked brighter! 

Value Working Group Pivoting to Meet the Needs of OSPOs

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CHAOSS is very excited to be working more closely with the TODO Group as an Associate Member, to collaborate around open source community health metrics specifically for OSPOs. We often enjoy participation from folks working in OSPOs at all stages of their development, but previously we didn’t have a dedicated working group designed to address their specific needs. Coincidentally, we noticed over time that OSPO-relevant topics would pop up in our Value Working Group occasionally, and this was the place where OSPO managers would often enter the CHAOSS community. 

As a result, we decided to formally pivot our Value Working Group from focusing on measuring the value a community offers individuals and companies, to an OSPO Working Group that would focus on the specific needs and challenges of those in the OSPO space, regardless of industry. We also wanted to give OSPO managers a place to connect with each other to talk about their challenges with building and maintaining a successful open source program.

With this new direction of our working group, we are looking to the larger open source community to help guide and build this team. We would love to get feedback from those working in the OSPO space, whether it be in a company, for a university, or any other place. What kinds of things are you measuring? What would you like to measure? What have been your successes or barriers to getting the data you need? 

If you are interested in joining this conversation, we invite you to do 2 things:

  • Join the CHAOSS #wg-ospo Slack channel
  • Join the OSPO Working Group Bi-weekly meeting (The next one is November 17 at 11:00 am US Central/Chicago Time). Connection details can be found here

We’d love to include you in this group and hear what’s on your mind! 

CHAOSS Community Survey is Open!

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A core value of CHAOSS is centering diversity, equity, and inclusion in everything we do. In order to make our community more welcoming and inclusive and continue to center DEI, we have been working with our DEI Audit team to develop a community survey. With this survey, we hope to increase our understanding of community members’ experiences within CHAOSS, and surface areas for improving our policies and practices.

We highly encourage all CHAOSS community members (past and present) to share their thoughts and experiences by completing this survey.

This survey:

  • has 14 questions in 3 sections
  • should take around 10-15 minutes to complete it
  • is completely anonymous and no personal information will be collected
  • is GDPR compliant
  • will be open until October 12

It is important to stress that this survey will remain completely anonymous. We will only share the results in an aggregated format, and high-level insights will be shared publicly by the DEI Audit Team. The results of this survey will be used to help the Audit Team develop recommendations for improving DEI within CHAOSS.

If you have ever considered yourself part of the community, we want to hear from you! You can take the survey until October 12 by following this link.

DEI Audit 2021

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In early spring of 2021, the CHAOSS project embarked on a 9-month journey to reflect on its own practices and policies surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion within the project. We were fortunate enough to receive a grant from the Ford Foundation to complete this work with the idea that we could not only improve DEI in our own project but also help other open source projects who are wanting to do the same. Centering DEI in an open source project creates a healthier and more productive environment for current members, it helps lower the barrier to contribution for others, and it fosters a more diverse and stronger community. This audit was a fantastic experience and in 2022 we will be continuing to implement ideas that stemmed from this work.

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CHAOSS DEI V3

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It’s been a year since the introduction of the CHAOSS DEI (Diversity Equity and Inclusion) badging initiative in the September of 2020, and we are happy to announce the release of CHAOSS DEI V3. This version introduces new and well-defined metrics and improved guidelines for reviewers. The CHAOSS DEI badging Initiative will also be issuing badges to open source projects in this new version.

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Metrics for Event Organizers

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Open source projects and ecosystems organize events to bring together the community members. These events provide the space for collaboration, deepening relationships, and making new friends.

The CHAOSS App Ecosystem Working Group describes a set of metrics for event organizers. The metrics are designed to support four goals that open source event organizers may have:

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Learn More

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It has been an amazing experience to build documentation with CHAOSS D&I Bading program during the past two months, and I am thrilled to announce that the first edition is now available as a subsection of the CHAOSS community handbook at :

https://handbook.chaoss.community/community-handbook/badging/overview

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Metrics for Event Organizers

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As many open source communities grow larger and older, they may face problems managing members’ engagement. People turn towards metrics to understand large systems and prioritize resources, but there has not been a consensus set of metrics for understanding open source communities.

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