I’m a big fan of periodically taking time to reflect on the past, and the new year seems like an excellent time to do so. So let’s look at some of the highlights from the CHAOSS community in 2023!
- Our Slack community doubled in 2023, as we went from about 900 members at the end of 2022 to about 1800 members currently.
- We hired a Director of Data Science (the one and only Dr. Dawn Foster) and launched our Data Science Initiative.
- We launched CHAOSS Latin America and CHAOSS Balkans as our newest chapters (Welcome to Selene Yang and Kristi Progri as our Chapter Leaders!)
- We completed the DEI Project Badging pilot working closely with GitHub’s All In project to host this within the CHAOSS project.
- In addition to our usual CHAOSScon EU and CHAOSScon NA events, we held our first CHAOSScon Africa event, which was a huge success!
- We retired our Risk and Evolution working groups and launched two new Context Working Groups instead: OSS in Universities and Scientific Communities.
- We ushered in some new Board Members: Anita ihuman, Ruth Ikegah, Brian Proffitt, and Kevin Lumbard. Dr. Dawn Foster became a new Board Co-Chair, joining Sean Goggins in the leadership role, and thank you to Nicole Huesman as outgoing Co-Chair for all of her hard work in this role over the past 2 years.
- We expanded our outreach to span across many global open source conferences (and we gave away a couple of LEGO Globes to represent the global nature of the CHAOSS project).
- Our number of released Metrics Models grew from 1 to 16!
- We badged 50 open source events in our DEI Event Badging Initiative and grew our team of active Badgers to 24.
- We shared our framework for surveying a community around DEI initiatives and released the results of our own internal DEI survey.
- We shared Anita ihuman’s incredible research on CHAOSS DEI metrics.
- We started a CHAOTIC of the Week series to highlight some of our community members and the great work they do in the community.
- We launched a program called Tour Guides to help newcomers find their way.
- We recently restarted the CHAOSSCast podcast with a new episode about every 2 weeks highlighting something interesting from the CHAOSS community.
- We received continued support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Ford Foundation to help us keep the CHAOSS community one of the best communities on the planet.
2023 was a time for growth and represented a subtle shift in how CHAOSS thinks about metrics. We have even more in mind for 2024, which you can learn more about in our recent podcast: CHAOSS Goals for 2024 and Beyond. It has never been more exciting to be a CHAOTIC! We truly hope you can join our community and help all of us improve the health of our open source communities.