Dawn Foster Archives - CHAOSS

The CHAOSS crew was well-represented at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit event in Bilbao last week with several talks and panels from CHAOSS community members. 

On Tuesday, we held a panel discussion: Demonstrating OSPO Value with Daniel Izquierdo, Chan Voong, David Hirsch, and me. The idea for this panel came out of the CHAOSS OSPO WG, and during the panel we talked about how to demonstrate OSPO impact using metrics, practical applications for OSPOs, tools, and how to build a narrative for your stakeholders out of your data.

CHAOSS board member, Brian Proffitt, along with his Red Hat colleague, Natalie Pazmiño, held a session about the challenges of Measuring the Impact of Community Events, which can be harder to measure than traditional industry events that rely mostly on lead generation. They talked about creating collateral that can be measured (e.g., whitepaper downloads, landing pages via QR code) and creating opportunities for later participation in a channel that you can measure. They had some creative approaches, so I talked to Brian about the possibility of creating some CHAOSS metrics / metrics models to share their ideas.

Daniel Izquierdo and Yehui Wang had a session about Building SaaS Services with CHAOSS Technology to Evaluate Community Health and Sustainability where they talked about how CHAOSS’ GrimoireLab software is based on 16 years of research, development, and testing in the market, which made it possible for OSS Compass to be built on top of GrimoireLab in just one year! OSS Compass is a SaaS solution implementing CHAOSS metrics and metrics models, and the slides at the link above show examples of how they’ve implemented them. CHAOSS has brought great visibility for GrimoireLab, and the community has been a great amplifier. 

I also gave a talk about Contributor Growth Strategies for OSS Projects where I talked about the challenges that maintainers face and how hard it can be to get more people participating in a project along with some ideas for ways that these challenges can be overcome. I used several graphs from CHAOSS tools to demonstrate how metrics can help maintainers decide where to focus their efforts for growing their contributor base. The slides in the link above have more details about the challenges, solutions, and metrics. 

In addition to the talks from the Chaotics at the event, there were a few others that I found interesting:

• Nithya Ruff’s keynote about the Evolving OSPO touched on several topics that we’ve been talking about recently in the OSPO WG. She talked about how risk can slow innovation, and how OSPOs are working hard to manage risks that include licenses, AI, security, and regulations.
• Building On-Ramps for Non-Code Contributors in Open Source by Natali Vlatko and Celeste Horgan echoed many of the conversations we’ve had over the years in the CHAOSS DEI WG with some solid ideas for both maintainers and contributors about how to get more people engaged in your project through documentation, community, project management, and other roles.
• There were also a bunch of other talks that were relevant for CHAOSS folks, especially some from the Diversity Empowerment Summit, Open Source Leadership Summit, and OSPOCon.

The individual session videos aren’t yet available, but the full day videos for some tracks are available, and this video from the Leadership track contains the talks from Daniel and Yehui (time index 16:20), Natali and Celeste (1:08:50), and my talk (2:05:01).

In addition to the content from the talks, Linux Foundation Research also released 4 new reports: The 2023 State of OSPOs and OSS Initiatives, The World of Open Source Europe Spotlight 2023, The European Public Sector Open Source Opportunity, and Open Source for Sustainability.

Overall, it was great to see many of my CHAOSS friends, some of them for the first time in person. We had great conversations and fun both at the conference and over pintxos, a traditional food in northern Spain’s Basque region.