CHAOSS is a new Linux Foundation project aimed at producing integrated, open source software for analyzing software development, together with defining implementation-agnostic metrics for measuring community activity, contributions, and health. The CHAOSS community will help improve transparency of key project metrics, contributing to improve the project itself, as well as helping third parties make informed decisions when engaging with projects.
Understanding the community dynamics of open source software projects is of fundamental importance to developers, users, and decision makers, but gaining this needed knowledge is a specialized, time-consuming, and error-prone tasks. The CHAOSS community helps in this task, by highlighting aspects of the projects, tracking relevant patterns, and assisting in the early identification of problems and the detection of trends. In the addition, the CHAOSS community explores what these aspects signal, how they are related to value, and how they might be used in positive or negative ways by people. Collectively, the CHAOSS community work can be used to study the structure of a community and its growth, maturity, and decline, examine project risk and vulnerabilities, understand project diversity, and explore a project’s position within a larger software ecosystem.
Publishing these requirements as well as developing working technical systems in the open, so they can be engaged and shaped by everyone, is a step beyond in transparency -- enabling better decision making, better awareness of problems, and deeper knowledge about the project dynamics.
