About CHAOSScon

Meet the CHAOSS community. Learn about metrics and tools used by several open source projects, communities, and engineering teams to track and analyze their development activities, community's health, diversity, risk, and value.

This conference is conveniently being held the day before FOSDEM in Brussels to allow people to attend both events. It will include CHAOSS updates, use cases, and hands-on workshops for developers, community managers, project managers, and anyone interested in measuring open source project health.

Specific CHAOSS software highlighted will be GrimoireLab and Augur with their respective updates and demos.

We will also share insights from the CHAOSS workgroups on Diversity and Inclusion, Growth-Maturity-Decline, Risk, and Value that branched out from the CHAOSS metrics work.

Where?

L42 Business Center & Workspaces
Métro Arts-Loi, 42 Rue de la Loi (map)
Brussels, Belgium

When?

Friday, February 1st, 2019

Schedule: Friday, February 1, 2019

Speakers and Session Descriptions

Alberto Perez

Researcher and Software Developer - Bitergia

Software engineer at Bitergia and analytics team member. After finishing his PhD on web page representation for clustering tasks in 2012, he has been working in projects involving data retrieval and analysis from different data sources. He has experience with Java, Spring, Python, MySQL, Apache Solr and ElasticSearch, among others. Apart from implementing metrics with Python and Kibana and according to his close family, he is interested in too many things to write a list here.

Session: Creating a Collection of Panels

During the last months, we have been dealing with dozens of panels and its number keeps increasing. It is expected to have many more, and it is becoming hard to deal with this amount of information. We need to scale!

The concept of collections of panels aims at bringing some order into the existing repository. A panel collection is just a set of Kibana dashboards. In this case, each panel is a Kibana dashboard consisting of a set of widgets.

GrimoireLab CHAOSS GMD code development metrics is an example where this concept can be applied. What about having a collection of GMD panels? This would be based on publicly available and could be built on top of GrimoreLab, so anyone can deploy the panels and get them working for their own purposes.

We will show the collection built on top real data, retrieved and processed by means of GrimoireLab projects. From that point, we will take a walk on the panels offering a closer look at the metrics. Looking at real numbers ease to get a deeper understanding of the metrics, as we can see them in action.

Alex Courouble

Open Source Engineer - VMware

Alex is an Open Source Engineer at VMware Open Source Technology Center, where he works on VMware open source contribution analytics. Before VMware, Alex was a getting his masters in Software Engineering at Polytechnique Montreal, where he researched collaboration and contribution in Open Source communities.

Session: Your Team’s Open Source Contributions, in One Dashboard

With the rise of Open Source Program Offices in the industry, we are observing a rise in teams dedicated to upstream open source contributions. As this often represents the result of a large investment from a company, it is important to be able to quantify and monitor the team’s contributions over time. To answer this, we created a tool that tracks the open source contributions from a list of users. The tool uses Perceval and the GitHub API to track pull requests, issues, comments, reviews, commits authored, and commits merged. The dashboard then displays a summary of the team’s contributions, any user’s contributions as well as a series of charts.

Ana Jimenez Santamaria

Marketing Specialist - Bitergia

Ana holds a Bachelor degree in Marketing and is currently working at Bitergia, a software development analytics company focused on OpenSource and InnerSource environments.

Session: Putting order into CHAOSS: metrics to analyze code development

CHAOSS Growth, Maturity and Decline working group provides several metrics definitions focused on code development. Using GrimoireLab we have put some of those definitions into action by setting up a collection of panels for tracking and visualizing specific datasets. During the talk we will present this collection of panels taking a deeper look to the metrics applied in a real use case.

Brian Proffitt

Senior Principal Community Architect - Red Hat

Brian is a Senior Principal Community Architect for Open Source and Standards team at Red Hat, responsible for community content, onboarding, and open source consulting. A former technology journalist, Brian is also a graduate lecturer at the University of Notre Dame. Follow him on Twitter @TheTechScribe.

Session: A Tale of Metrics Faux Pas: Answers Without Questions

We all recognize that metrics are key to measuring community health. And that quantitative data is a key to these metrics. But, as Brian Proffitt will describe in this talk, all the data in the world won't help you find answers if you don't know what the questions are. Brian will walk attendees through what happens when pretty data can distract from the real purpose of metrics.

Daniel Izquierdo

Data Analyst - Bitergia

Daniel Izquierdo is co-founder of Bitergia, a start-up focused on providing metrics and consultancy about open source projects. His main interests about open source are related to the community itself, trying to help community managers, organizations and developers to better understand how the project is performing. He has contributed to several open analytics dashboards such as the OpenStack, Wikimedia or Xen. He has participated as speaker giving details about gender diversity in OpenStack, InnerSource metrics strategy at OSCON, and other metrics-related talks.

Session: Putting order into CHAOSS: metrics to analyze code development

CHAOSS Growth, Maturity and Decline working group provides several metrics definitions focused on code development. Using GrimoireLab we have put some of those definitions into action by setting up a collection of panels for tracking and visualizing specific datasets. During the talk we will present this collection of panels taking a deeper look to the metrics applied in a real use case.

Session: Creating a Collection of Panels

During the last months, we have been dealing with dozens of panels and its number keeps increasing. It is expected to have many more, and it is becoming hard to deal with this amount of information. We need to scale!

The concept of collections of panels aims at bringing some order into the existing repository. A panel collection is just a set of Kibana dashboards. In this case, each panel is a Kibana dashboard consisting of a set of widgets.

GrimoireLab CHAOSS GMD code development metrics is an example where this concept can be applied. What about having a collection of GMD panels? This would be based on publicly available and could be built on top of GrimoreLab, so anyone can deploy the panels and get them working for their own purposes.

We will show the collection built on top real data, retrieved and processed by means of GrimoireLab projects. From that point, we will take a walk on the panels offering a closer look at the metrics. Looking at real numbers ease to get a deeper understanding of the metrics, as we can see them in action.

Session: Diversity & Inclusion WG Tutorial

While it is recognized that diversity and inclusion are central to the health of open source communities, numbers lag and the ability to foster inclusive environments remains challenging. The CHAOSS Project’s Diversity & Inclusion Working group is focused on establishing a set of community-curated, peer-validated, research-informed standards and best practices to measure, and in turn, increase, diversity and inclusion across open source communities. In this interactive tutorial, you will contribute to this work by breaking into groups to define several diversity and inclusion metrics. Let’s work together to make our collective open source communities more welcoming, broader and heterogeneous.

Dawn Foster

Open Source Software Strategy Lead - Pivotal

Dawn is currently working on open source strategy at Pivotal. She has more than 20 years of experience in business and technology with expertise in strategic planning, management, community building, community management, open source software, market research, and more. She is passionate about bringing people together through a combination of online communities and real-world events. She has experience building new communities, and managing existing communities with a particular emphasis on developer and open source communities.

Most recently, Dawn was a consultant at The Scale Factory after being Director of Community at Puppet. Prior to Puppet, she was leading the Community Office within Intel’s Open Source Technology Center. In addition to working at Intel, Dawn was an online community consultant, and she has worked at Jive Software, Compiere, and a Midwestern manufacturing company in positions ranging from Unix system administrator to market researcher to community manager to open source strategist.

Dawn holds a PhD from the University of Greenwich, an MBA from Ashland University, and a BS in Computer Science from Kent State University. Dawn blogs about online communities as the author of the Fast Wonder Blog, and she's blogged for The New Stack, Linux.com, GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily, and in various other places. She is the author of the books, What Dawn Eats: Vegan Food That Isn’t Weird and Companies and Communities: Participating without being sleazy.

Session: Diversity & Inclusion WG Tutorial

While it is recognized that diversity and inclusion are central to the health of open source communities, numbers lag and the ability to foster inclusive environments remains challenging. The CHAOSS Project’s Diversity & Inclusion Working group is focused on establishing a set of community-curated, peer-validated, research-informed standards and best practices to measure, and in turn, increase, diversity and inclusion across open source communities. In this interactive tutorial, you will contribute to this work by breaking into groups to define several diversity and inclusion metrics. Let’s work together to make our collective open source communities more welcoming, broader and heterogeneous.

Ildiko Vancsa

Ecosystem Technical Lead - OpenStack Foundation

Ildikó started her journey with virtualization during the university years and has been in connection with this technology different ways since then. She started her career at a small research and development company in Budapest, where she was focusing on areas like system management and business process modelling and optimization. Ildikó got in touch with OpenStack when she started to work in the cloud project at Ericsson in 2013. She was a member of the Ceilometer and Aodh core teams, now she drives NFV related feature development activities in projects like Nova and Cinder. Beyond code and documentation contributions she is also very passionate about on boarding and training activities, which is one of her focus areas within the OpenStack Foundation.

Session: Keynote 2: Finding the Order in the Chaos(s) of Metrics: Are We There Yet?

We often ask ourselves and look around in our environments, wondering if our actions and activities are up to standards and efficient enough or if there is room for improvement. Measuring efficiency, modeling health with numbers, and creating dashboards have been part of our lives for a long time now, but do we do it in the right way? Are we abusing the numbers or are we looking at accurate pictures at all times?

The CHAOSS project was created to help navigating the chaos of metrics. CHAOSS exists to help understand the purpose of numbers and KPI’s and to understand the dynamics and health of our environments -- corporate and open source.

This presentation will give you an overview about the importance and danger of metrics with some anecdotes and the work the CHAOSS project is doing. You will learn about the working groups as well as get a picture about the status of software components designed and developed by the community.

Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona

Founder - Bitergia / Professor - Uni. Rey Juan Carlos

Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona is co-founder of Bitergia, the software development analytics company specialized in the analysis of free / open source software projects. He is also professor in Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Spain), in the context of the GSyC/LibreSoft research group. His interests include the study of communities of software development, with a focus on quantitative and empirical studies. He enjoys taking photos of the coffee he drinks around the world.

Session: Growth-Maturity-Decline WG Tutorial

The GMD working group is exploring metrics related to growth-maturity-decline and other focus areas (such as risk). Our idea is to go top down, from the definition of the focus areas down to the goals that we want to fulfill in those areas, the questions that we would like to answer to reach those goals, and finally the metrics that could help us to better answer those questions. We also intend to work in reference implementations for the metrics. In parallel, we also work bottom-up, by collecting use case from real life.

This will be a workshop to explain all of this in more detail, to also explain our procedures, and how anyone can contribute. The workshop will also include a discussion on the current status of the working group, and on specific aspects of the focus areas, goals, questions and metrics we're considering. Anyone is welcome to submit issues and pull requests in advance, to propose topics of their interest.

Luis Canas-Diaz

Co-founder - Bitergia

Since July 2012, Luis is one of the co-founders of Bitergia, which aims to obtain and analyze metrics and data about FLOSS projects. During these first two years, Bitergia has been working with well-known communities like Openstack, Eclipse, Puppet, Wikimedia, LIferay, Cloudstack, and others.

Session: GrimoireLab Alerts

The main benefit of having data about complex environments such as software communities it to perform actions based on the gathered knowledge. When these actions need to be executed when specific conditions are matched the importance of an alert system grows. In this talk we will see how to setup email alerts based on metrics using the CHAOSS/GrimoireLab platform and some new FLOSS components

Manrique Lopez

CEO - Bitergia

CEO at Bitergia, one of company's shareholders and a free, open source software development communities passionate. Research and development experience in several companies and organizations like W3C working groups, Ándago Engineering, Continua Health Alliance. Former Spanish Open Source Enterprises Association (ASOLIF) manager, and expert consultant for the National Open Source Reference Center (CENATIC). Involved in several communities related to free, open source software like GPE Palmtop Environment (GPE), Maemo, Meego, Mozilla Madrid, Google Developers Group, GrimoireLab, CHAOSS, etc.

Session: What's new in CHAOSS/GrimoireLab?

It's been more than a year ago when GrimoireLab has joined CHAOSS as one of the founding software projects and its little community has grown significantly. New features have been added, others are discussed or are being developed for upcoming releases.

GrimoireLab started some years ago as a little project evolving from legacy Bitergia's open source development analytics tools. During first years, the project was focus on supporting as many data sources as possible and creating the ground for flexible analytics and reporting. The main known output for GrimoireLab users is the GrimoireLab Dashboard, with its set of predefined panels that show some interesting metrics.

This talk will show some of the latest features. For example the ones focus on easy panels customization, to easily get the answer to the questions each user has. How these customizations can be shared, reused and adapted by others for their specific use cases will be also shown. The concept of ""GrimoireLab panels collection"" shall be discussed as one key feature. As extra ball, we'll present the CHAOSS Metrics panels collection.

After this talk, attendees shall be able to take advantage of these features for their own analytics needs.

Nithya Ruff

Sr. Director, Open Source Practice - Comcast

Nithya A. Ruff is the Head of Comcast’s Open Source Practice. She is responsible for growing Open Source culture inside of Comcast and engagement with external communities. Prior to this, she started and grew Western Digital’s Open Source Strategy Office. She first glimpsed the power of open source while at SGI in the 90s and has been building bridges between companies and the open source community ever since. She’s also held leadership positions at Wind, Synopsys, Avaya, Tripwire and Eastman Kodak. At Wind, she led a team of product managers in managing a world class embedded Linux distribution and was a key member of the Yocto Project advocacy team on the board. Nithya is an At-large Director on the Linux Foundation Board and represents community interests on the board. She also sits on the CodeChix Board, a non-profit focused on retaining women in engineering and technology.

Nithya has been a passionate advocate and a speaker for opening doors to new people in Open Source for many years. She has also been a promoter of valuing diverse ways of contributing to open source such as in marketing, legal and community. You can often find her on social media promoting dialogue on diversity and open source. She has spoken at multiple conferences such as OSSummit, OSCON, All Things Open, SCALE, Grace Hopper, OpenStack, VMWorld, OS Strategy Summit and Red Hat Summit on the business and community of open source. In recognition of her work in open source both on the business and community side, she was named to CIO magazine’s most influential women in open source list. She was recently one of 4 people to win the 2017 O’Reilly Open Source Award for exceptional contribution to open source.

Session: Keynote: The Value of Metrics to Drive Your OSPO Plans

It is critical to measure the right activities and investments to evolve the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) at Comcast. It is also important to reward the right behaviors and culture changes. I will talk about the metrics project at the Comcast OSPO and how it has helped us shape a more effective OSPO.

Ray Paik

Community Manager - GitLab

Ray worked at the Linux Foundation and was responsible for the day-to-day operation of the OPNFV community since its launch in 2014. He has over 15 years of experience in the high-tech industry in roles ranging from software engineer, product manager, program manager, account manager, and team lead at companies such as EDS, Intel and Medallia. Ray lives in Sunnyvale, CA with his wife and daughter and all three are loyal season ticket holders of the San Jose Earthquakes soccer team.

Session: Metrics in a company-led open source project

Ray used community metrics in two very different open source communities over the past 4+ years. One was a foundation hosted project (www.opnfv.org) with dozens of member companies, and the other is a single-company led open source project at GitLab (https://about.gitlab.com/). In this session, Ray will discuss both similarities and different challenges that he has seen when working with metrics in these two communities. In addition, Ray will share learnings during his transition to a company-led project including identification of goals and stakeholders for community metrics. Ray will then discuss how metrics are being used and analyzed at GitLab.

Sanja Bonic

Senior Technical Program Manager - Red Hat

Sanja is responsible for the Fedora CoreOS, Fedora Silverblue, Flatpak, and container tooling communities at Red Hat. She likes to tinker with Linux, crunch numbers, and play video games.

Session: Hack Days...???...Profit

There are three types of metrics: metrics, damned metrics, and KPIs.

Community health metrics, like any other data, are all about interpretation and perspective. The goal of this talk is to enable you to get your own point across to decision makers by using the numbers game.

Marketing budgets even within small companies are typically well over 500,000 USD while less expensive and more effective ways to marketing are disregarded. This talk explains the difference between marketing, developer advocacy, community management, and how you can convince your boss to let you and developers around you be more autonomous to increase business performance.

This translates to voluntary hack days, travelling to at least 1-2 conferences per year, and increasing the awareness for your company in a smarter way than a clickable blocked ad on the internet can. Number crunching and KPIs for each section included.

Sean Goggins

Professor - University of Missouri

Sean is an open source software researcher and a founding member of the Linux Foundation’s working group on community health analytics for open source software CHAOSS, co-lead of the CHAOSS metrics software working group and leader of the open source metrics tool AUGUR which can be forked and cloned and experimented with on GitHub. After a decade as a software engineer, Sean decided his calling was in research. His open source research is framed around a broader agenda of social computing research, which he pursues as an associate professor of computer science at the University of Missouri.

Session: Growth-Maturity-Decline WG Tutorial

The GMD working group is exploring metrics related to growth-maturity-decline and other focus areas (such as risk). Our idea is to go top down, from the definition of the focus areas down to the goals that we want to fulfill in those areas, the questions that we would like to answer to reach those goals, and finally the metrics that could help us to better answer those questions. We also intend to work in reference implementations for the metrics. In parallel, we also work bottom-up, by collecting use case from real life.

This will be a workshop to explain all of this in more detail, to also explain our procedures, and how anyone can contribute. The workshop will also include a discussion on the current status of the working group, and on specific aspects of the focus areas, goals, questions and metrics we're considering. Anyone is welcome to submit issues and pull requests in advance, to propose topics of their interest.

Valerio Cosentino

Software Engineer - Bitergia

Valerio is a software engineer at Bitergia. His expertise and interests include software analysis, database technologies and open source. Before joining Bitergia, he was a Phd student at IBM France and postdoctoral fellow in a couple of research teams between France and Spain. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2013.

Session: Graal: Get the Knowledge Out of Your Code

Source code contains plenty of information useful derive insightful metrics about your software project. Such an information can be extracted with source code analysis tools. however, they do not often come with features to support incremental analysis. Furthermore they generally lack of support to combine their results with other analysis tools or relate them with other software project data (e.g., bugs, pull requests).

This lighting talk presents Graal, an open source tool that helps you to collect data from your source code in an easy and consistent way, and offers the results in a flexible JSON format, useful to ease the bridging with analysis and/or visualization tools. Graal relies on a a customizable and incremental approach that allows combining and manipulating the output of existing source code analysis tools.

Graal leverages on Perceval, that simplifies the collection of project data by covering more than 30 well-known tools and platforms related to contributing to open source development. Graal shares with Perceval the same output format, which enables you to combine together all your software project data to define cross-cutting analytics. Perceval and Graal are fully open source and part of GrimoireLab, a popular platform to define software development analytics for your project. GrimoireLab is developed by Bitergia and it is one of the assets of the CHAOSS project of the Linux Foundation.

Session: SortingHat: Managing Contributor Identities in your Software Project

Contributors of open source projects rely on a plethora of tools (e.g., Git, Slack, GitHub) to coordinate and support development-related activities. Such tools often provide authentication mechanisms that require a combination of an email, an username and a full name. Thus, the same contributor may end up having different identities on the tools he is working on. In a scenario where you want to check the contributions of an individual in your project, you may face a difficult nut to crack. What to do then? Of course, you may develop ad-hoc scripts or perform manual work to merge identities, or you can use SortingHat.

SortingHat helps you to track contributor identities and their related information such as gender, country and organization enrollments. It allows you to manipulate identities interactively as well as to load them via batch files (useful for projects with large communities). SortingHat functionalities can also be used through Hatstall, which provides a handy graphical interface for non-technical users. In this talk you will see how easy is to manage contributor identities and how to empower your project with analytics focused on individual contributions.

SortingHat and HatStall are two components of GrimoireLab, an industry strong open source platform developed by Bitergia, which offers commercial software analytics and is part of the CHAOSS project of the Linux Foundation.

Organizing Committee

• Alolita Sharma, Amazon Web Services
• Daniel Izquierdo, Bitergia
• Dawn Foster, Pivotal
• Georg Link, University of Nebraska at Omaha
• Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona, Rey Juan Carlos University / Bitergia
• Kevin Lumbard, University of Nebraska at Omaha
• Nicole Huesman, Intel
• Ray Paik, GitLab

Call for Participation

Submit a Proposal

Submission is now closed.

Dates to Remember:

• CFP Opens: October 4, 2018
• CFP Closes: November 26, 2018
• CFP Notifications: December 3, 2018
• Schedule Announcement: December 18, 2018
• Slide Due Date: January 29, 2019
• Event Date: February 1, 2019

Upcoming Events

Past Events

• CHAOSScon 2022 Europe, September 12, 2022, Dublin, Ireland, co-located with Open Source Summit Europe 2022
• CHAOSScon 2021 North America, September 30, 2021, Seattle, USA, co-located with Open Source Summit 2022
• CHAOSScon 2020 Europe, January 31, 2020, Brussels, Belgium, co-located with FOSDEM 2020.
• CHAOSScon 2019 North America, August 20th, 2019, San Diego, California, co-located with Open Source Summit 2019.
• CHAOSScon 2019 Europe, February 1, 2019, Brussels, Belgium, co-located with FOSDEM 2019.
• CHAOSScon 2018 North America, August 28, 2018, Vancouver, Canada, co-located with Open Source Summit North America 2018.
• CHAOSScon 2018 Europe, February 2, 2018, Brussels, Belgium, co-located with FOSDEM 2018.