Open source community analysis with actionable insights
Organizations are increasingly adopting open source software development models and open source aspects of organizational culture. As a result, interest in how open source communities succeed is reaching an all-time high.
Until recent years, measuring the success of open source communities was haphazard and anecdotal. Ask someone what makes one community more successful than another, and you will likely get observations such as, "The software is great, so the community is too," or "The people in this community just mesh well." The problem with these evaluations is not that they are necessarily wrong, but that they don't provide information that others can use to reproduce successful results. What works for one community is not necessarily going to work for another.
Research universities, businesses, and other organizations interested in determining what makes open source projects successful have begun to collaborate on finding ways to measure aspects of community in a qualitative and data-driven way. One of the more prominent efforts is CHAOSS, a Linux Foundation project focused on creating metrics, metrics models, and software to better understand open source community health on a global scale. Unhealthy projects hurt both their communities and the organizations relying on those projects, so identifying measures of robustness isn't just an interesting project. It's critical to the open source ecosystem.