This guide is part of a three part series. This is part three. Read part one or two for context and a deep dive into the metrics respectively. In the…
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One of the things that we are exploring in the CHAOSS project is how our open source community health efforts can prove useful in Scientific Software communities. Sean and I had a chance to present our work at the [Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Essential Open Source Software for Science](https://chanzuckerberg.com/eoss/) meeting on December 9th, 2020.
Community managers take a variety of perspectives, depending on where their communities are in the lifecycle of growth, maturity, and decline. This is an evolving report of what we are learning from community managers, some of whom we are working with on live experiments with a CHAOSS project prototyping software tool called Augur (http://www.github.com/CHAOSS/augur). At this point, we are paying particular focus to how community managers consume metrics and how the presentation of open source software health and sustainability metrics could make them more and in some cases less useful for doing their jobs.
My colleague Matt Germonprez recently hit me and around 50 other people at CHAOSScon North America (2018) with this observation:
“A lot of times we get really great answers to the wrong questions.”
Matt explained this phenomena as “type III error”, an allusion to the more well known statistical phenomena of type I and type II errors. If you are trying to solve a problem or improve a situation, sometimes great answers to the wrong questions can still be useful because in all likelihood somebody is looking for the answer to that question! Or maybe it answers another curiosity you were not even thinking about. I think we should call this (Erdelez, 1997). There’s an old adage:
“Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while.”