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Measuring the Health of Open Source Communities
Abstract: Tracking different types of metrics is essential for free and open source communities. Metrics give project insights into specific efforts and help get a feel of the community’s general perception. For that, tools that can pull data from various sources and develop a visualization of this data will help projects make informed decisions.
If you manage or want to be part of an open source project, you might have wondered if the project is healthy or not and how to measure key performance indicators relating to project health.
You could choose to analyze different aspects of the project, such as the technical health (such as number of forks on GitHub, number of contributors over time, and number of bugs reported over time), the financial health (such as the donations and revenues over time), the social aspects (such as social media mentions, post shares, and sentiment analysis across social media channels), and diversity and inclusion aspects (such as having a code of conduct, create event inclusion activities, color-blind-accessible materials in presentations, and project front-end designs).
The question is, how do you measure such aspects? To determine if a project’s overall health, metrics should be computed and analyzed over time. It’s helpful to have such metrics in a dashboard to facilitate analysis and decision-making.
Why do metrics matter?
“The goal here is not to construct an enormous vacuum cleaner to suck every tiny detail of your community into a graph. The goal is instead to identify what we don’t know about our community and to use measurements as a means to understand those things better.”
The Art of Community – Jono Bacon
Open source software needs community. By knowing more about the community through different metrics, stakeholders can make informed decisions. For example, developers can select the best project to join, maintainers can decide which governance measures are effective, end-users can select the healthier project that will live longer (and prosper), and investors can select the best project to invest in [1].
Furthermore, Open Source Program Offices (OSPO), i.e., offices inside companies that aim to manage the open source ecosystems that the company depends on [5], can assess the project’s health and sustainability by analyzing different metrics. OSPO is becoming very popular because around 90% of the components of modern applications are open source [6]. Thus, measuring the risks of consuming, contributing to, and releasing open source software is very important to OSPO [5].
How do we define which metrics to evaluate?
- Set your goals: Measuring without a goal is just pointless. Goals are concrete targets to know what the community wants to achieve [3].
- Find reliable statistical sources: After defining your goals, you can then identify the source to help you achieve your goals. It is essential to find ways to get statistics on the most important goals [4]. Some statistics are apparent, such as on GitHub, you can collect the number of stars, number of forks, and number of contributors to a repository. It is also possible to get mailing lists subscribers and the project website visits. Some statistics are not so obvious, though, and you might need tools to help extract such numbers.
- Interpret the statistics: Interpret the statistics regarding the “4 P’s”: People, Project, Process, and Partners [4].
-
- Look at the numbers mostly related to the People in the community, such as contributors’ productivity, which channels have the most impact, etc.
-
- Then, look at the velocity and maturity of your Project, such as the number of PRs, and the number of issues.
-
- After that, look at the maturity of your Process, i.e., what’s your review process? How long does it take to solve an issue?
-
- Finally, look at the ecosystem view regarding your Partners — that is, statistics on project dependencies and projects that depend on you.
- Use dashboards to evaluate your metrics: Many existing tools help to create dashboards to analyze and measure open source community healthiness, such as LFX Insights, Bitergia, and GrimoireLab.
- Make changes: After measuring, it is necessary to make changes based on those measurements.
Learning from examples
Different projects use different strategies to measure the project’s health.
The CHAOSS Community creates analytics and metrics to help understand project health. They have many working groups, each one focusing on a specific kind of metric. For example,
- The Diversity and Inclusion working group focuses on the diversity and inclusion in events, how diverse and inclusive the governance of a community is, and how healthy the community leadership is.
- The Evolution working group creates metrics for analyzing the type and frequency of activities involved in software development, improving the project quality, and community growth.
- The Value working group creates metrics for identifying the degree to which a project improves people’s lives beyond the software project, the degree to which the project is valuable to a user or contributor, and the degree to which the project is monetarily valuable from an organization point of view.
- The Risk working group creates metrics to understand the quality of a specific software package, potential intellectual property issues, and understand how transparent a given software package is concerning licenses, dependencies, etc.
The Mozilla project collaborated with Bitergia and Analyse & Tal to build an interactive network visualization of Mozilla’s contributor communities. By visualizing different metrics, they were able to find that Mozilla has not only one community but many communities concerning other areas of contributions, motivations, engagement levels, etc. Based on that, they built a report to visualize how these different communities are interconnected.
LFX Insights
Many projects such as Kubernetes and TARS use the LFX Insights tool to analyze their community.
The LFX Insights dashboard helps project communities evaluate different metrics concerning open source development to grow a sustainable open source ecosystem. The tool has distinct features to support various stakeholders [2], such as
- Maintainers and project leads can get a multi-dimensional reporting of the project, avoid maintainer burnout, ensure the project’s health, security, and sustainability.
- Project marketers and community evangelists can use the metrics to attract new members, engage the community, and identify opportunities to increase awareness.
- Members and corporate sponsors can know which community and software to engage in, communicate the impact within the community, and evaluate their employees’ open source contributions.
- Open source developers can know where to focus their efforts, showcase their leadership and expertise, manage affiliations and their impact.
The source code repository includes the number of commits in total and by contributor, the number of contributors, the top contributors by commits, and the companies that mainly contribute to the project. Users can extract Pull requests (PRs) from many tools such as Gerrit and GitHub. Furthermore, users, maintainers, and contributors to Linux Foundation projects, such as TARS, can extract various metrics from LFX Insights.
Similarly to commits, the number of PRs in total, by contributor, and by company. The tool also calculates the average time to review the PR and the PRs that are still to be merged. You can also extract metrics for issues and continuous integration tools. Besides that, LFX Insights allows projects to collect communication and collaboration information from different communication channels such as mailing lists, Slack, and Twitter.
Projects might have different goals when using LFX Insights. The TARS project, part of the TARS Foundation, uses the LFX Insights tool to have a big picture of each sub-project (such as TARSFramework, TARSGo, etc.). Through the dashboards created by the LFX Insights tool, the TARS community can know the statistics of each project and the community as a whole (see Figure 1 and 2).
Using LFX Insights tools, the TARS community analyzes how many people contribute to each project and which organizations contribute to TARS. Additionally, they extract the number of commits and lines of code contributed by each contributor. The TARS community believes that by analyzing such metrics, they can attract and retain more contributors.
About the authors:
Isabella Ferreira is an Ambassador at the TARS Foundation, a cloud-native open-source microservice foundation under the Linux Foundation.
Mark Shan is the Chair at Tencent Open Source Alliance and also Board Chair of the TARS Foundation Governing Board.
REFERENCES
[1] Jansen, Slinger. “Measuring the health of open source software ecosystems: Beyond the scope of project health.” Information and Software Technology 56.11 (2014): 1508-1519.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwTOrDg3LsI
[3] https://opensource.com/bus/16/8/measuring-community-health
[4] https://dzone.com/articles/-measuring-metrics-in-open-source-projects
[5] https://opensource.com/article/20/5/open-source-program-office
[6] https://fossa.com/blog/building-open-source-program-office-ospo/
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The Linux Foundation Announces Conference Schedule for Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference 2021
Premier open source event covering the most critical and innovative open source topics gathers developers and technologists both in-person and virtually this September.
SAN FRANCISCO, July 22, 2021 — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the full schedule for Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference 2021, the leading conference for open source developers, technologists, and community leaders. The events are taking place September 27-30 in Seattle, Washington and are co-located with OSPOCon and Linux Security Summit, among others. The schedule can be viewed here and the keynote speakers can be viewed here.
OSS + ELC 2021 will feature a robust program of 250+ talks (keynote presentations, conference sessions, tutorials, and BoFs) covering the most essential and cutting edge topics touching open source today: Linux Systems, Dependability, AI & Data, DEI, Community Leadership, IoT, Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud Native Development, Databases, and of course, Embedded Linux. Plus the co-located OSPOCon, also announcing its conference agenda today, covers critical topics affecting open source program management offices. The events are being produced in a hybrid format, with both in-person and virtual participation available.
“These events cover the pivotal technologies at the core of software and hardware today, and shine a magnifying glass on innovation driving the change of tomorrow. This breadth of coverage, along with an audience ranging from students to kernel developers, is what makes this event a cornerstone gathering and learning place for the open source community,” says Angela Brown, SVP & General Manager of Events at The Linux Foundation. “We are so excited to gather in person with everyone again, and look forward to kicking off our fall schedule of in-person events in Seattle and engaging the community with wide ranging learning opportunities.”
Conference Session Highlights from Open Source Summit:
Wayfair Same-day Delivery: A Narrative in Painful Anecdotes about CI at Scale – Lelia Bray-Musso & Gary Preston White Jr., Wayfair EVE: A Secure API for the Edge that Delights App Developers – Kathy Giori, ZEDEDA Inc.A Rolling Stable Kernel Model – Sasha Levin, GoogleFunctional Safety Basics for Open Source Software Developers – Nicole Pappler & Prof. Dr. Andreas Bärwald, AlektoMetisSelf-serve Feature Engineering Platform Using Flyte and Feast – Ketan Umare, Union.ai
From Embedded Linux Conference:
OP-TEE: When Linux Loses Control – Clément Léger, BootlinFrom an Idea to a Patch in the Linux Mainline – Marta Rybczynska, SyslinbitYocto Continuous Integration in a Kube – Joshua Watt, Garmin
And from OSPOCon:
Ensuring OSS License Compliance the Easy Way – Tony Aiuto, GoogleEverything We’ve Learned from Three Years of Funding Open Source – Duane O’Brien, IndeedMVG – Minimum Viable Governance for Your Organization’s Open Collaboration Needs – Ashley Wolf & Justin Colannino, GitHub
Registration (in-person) is offered at the early price of US$850 through July 27. Academic, Student and Hobbyist Passes are available for US$275. Registration to attend virtually is US$50.
Members of The Linux Foundation receive a 20 percent discount off registration and can contact events@linuxfoundation.org to request a member discount code.
Diversity & Need-Based Scholarships and Travel Funding
Applications for diversity and need-based scholarships are currently being accepted here. The Linux Foundation’s Travel Fund is also accepting applications, with the goal of enabling open source developers and community members to attend events that they would otherwise be unable to attend due to a lack of funding. We place an emphasis on funding applicants who are from historically underrepresented or untapped groups and/or those of lower socioeconomic status. To learn more and apply, click here.
Health and Safety
In-person attendees will be required to be fully vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus and will need to comply with all on-site health measures, in accordance with The Linux Foundation Code of Conduct. To learn more, visit the Health & Safety webpage and read our blog post.
Sponsor
Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference 2021 is made possible thanks to our sponsors, including Diamond Sponsors: Google, IBM, Microsoft and Red Hat, Platinum Sponsors: Huawei, Snyk, and SUSE, and Gold Sponsors: Cloud Native Computing Foundation, SODA Foundation, Styra, WhiteSource and Witekio. For information on becoming an event sponsor, click here or email us for more information and to speak to our team.
Press
Members of the press who would like to request a press pass to attend should contact Kristin O’Connell.
About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 2,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit linuxfoundation.org.
The Linux Foundation Events are where the world’s leading technologists meet, collaborate, learn and network in order to advance innovations that support the world’s largest shared technologies.
Visit our website and follow us on Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook for all the latest event updates and announcements.
The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
###
Media Contact
Kristin O’Connell
The Linux Foundation
koconnell@linuxfoundation.org
The post The Linux Foundation Announces Conference Schedule for Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference 2021 appeared first on Linux Foundation.
Women Who Code and Linux Foundation Launch Open Source Scholarship
Linux Foundation Training & Certification is thrilled to announce that we are partnering with Women Who Code (WWCode), an international community dedicated to inspiring women to succeed in technology, to provide scholarships to promising women to help them get started working with open source software.
WWCode will award 50 scholarships per quarter to deserving women, with Linux Foundation Training & Certification providing each of these recipients with a voucher to register for any Linux Foundation eLearning course and certification exam at no charge, such as the Linux Foundation Certified IT Associate, Certified Kubernetes Administrator, Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator and more.
All Linux Foundation certification exams are conducted online with a proctor monitoring virtually via webcam and screen sharing. Scholarship recipients will have one year to sit for their exam, and should they fail to pass on the first attempt, one retake will be provided. Upon passing a certification exam, they will receive a PDF certificate and a digital badge which can be displayed on digital resumes and social media profiles, and which can be independently verified by potential employers.
“Open source technology is leading so much digital transformation today, from cloud computing to networking, web development, blockchain and more, yet there is a continual shortage of qualified talent generally, and fewer women pursuing these roles specifically,” said Linux Foundation SVP & GM of Training & Certification Clyde Seepersad. “At the same time, despite so much opportunity, barriers to entry and simply figuring out where to start can be daunting. We hope that this program makes it easier for many women to launch successful open source careers, and go on to inspire the next generation of developers, DevOps engineers, cloud architects and more.”
“Continuous learning is one of the cornerstones of tech industry leadership and success for diverse women,” said WWCode CEO Alaina Percival. “We are proud to be partnering with The Linux Foundation to provide these invaluable scholarship opportunities to our global community.”
Those interested in applying for a Women Who Code/Linux Foundation scholarship can do so here.
About Women Who Code
Women Who Code (WWCode) is an international nonprofit dedicated to inspiring women to excel in technology careers. WWCode is building a world where women are proportionally representative as technical leaders, executives, founders, VCs, board members, and software engineers. The organization has executed more than 14,000 free events around the world, garnered a membership exceeding 290,000 in 134 countries. Help empower even more women to advance in tech with the training and community they need to succeed by supporting WWCode. Learn more at womenwhocode.com.
The post Women Who Code and Linux Foundation Launch Open Source Scholarship appeared first on Linux Foundation – Training.
Chris Aniszczyk Talks About The Open 3D Foundation
The Linux Foundation recently announced a new foundation called the Open 3D Foundation for multi-platform 3D gaming technologies. Amazon’s Lumberyard has become the anchor project for the foundation, leading to creating the ‘first’ purely community-driven gaming engine. However, AAA games are not the only consumer of 3D gaming technologies; they have a wider usage in many other industries, including film production, automotive, healthcare, and so on. Under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation, O3DF will be able to bring different players from different industries and verticals to collaborate on technologies that have so far remained solely proprietary and dominated by a few companies. It’s going to commoditize and democratize gaming technologies, enabling many more players to build great services and products based on these technologies. In this interview, we sat down with Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF & VP of Developer Relations, The Linux Foundation to discuss the new foundation.
Happy SysAdmin Day! Save $100 on All Products – Plus a Free Gift
We love our SysAdmins at The Linux Foundation! You are the ones who keep so much of the technology we rely on running smoothly so we can all do our jobs. That’s why we want to recognize you with a special offer ahead of SysAdmin Day on July 30.
From now through July 30, 2021, everyone can save $100 on any of our products, simply by using code SYSADMIN100 at checkout. That means you can get the training or certification you’ve been considering at a significant discount, helping to improve your skills and credentials with products like:
Essentials of Linux System Administration (LFS201)
Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS)
Linux Networking & Administration (LFS211)
Linux Foundation Certified Engineer (LFCE)
With the most recent Open Source Jobs Report finding 93% of hiring managers are having difficulty finding enough open source talent, and 57% prioritizing hiring of certified professionals, this is a great time to learn a new skill. If you aren’t sure what to pursue, that’s ok! Check out our Plan Your Training page to view learning paths, or take our Career Path Quiz to figure out which area of technology best fits your interests and personality.
If you already know what you want to study, head straight to our product catalog and get started!
The post Happy SysAdmin Day! Save $100 on All Products – Plus a Free Gift appeared first on Linux Foundation – Training.
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Recent updates in the Linux kernel related to random number generation.
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The Linux Foundation Announces Keynote Speakers for Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference 2021
Premier event for open source developers and community will feature visionaries sharing insights on Machine Learning, Security, Linux, Gaming, Cloud, the Mars Ingenuity Mission and more.
SAN FRANCISCO, July 15, 2021 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the keynote speakers for Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference 2021, taking place September 27-30 in Seattle, Washington. The events are being produced in a hybrid format, with both in-person and virtual participation available, and are co-located with OSPOCon and Linux Security Summit, among others.
Open Source Summit (OSS) is the leading conference for developers, architects and other technologists – as well as open source community and industry leaders – to collaborate, share information, learn about the latest technologies and gain a competitive advantage by using innovative open solutions. Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) is the leading, vendor-neutral technical conference for companies and developers using Linux in embedded and industrial IoT products. Over 4,000 are expected to participate in the event.
Keynote speakers include:
Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) & Director, Machine Learning Research, NVIDIA, sharing on machine learning.
Tim Canham, Software and Operations Lead for the Mars Helicopter, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, discussing the use of Linux in the Mars Ingenuity mission.
Hilary Carter, Vice President of Research, and Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, The Linux Foundation, sharing insights on new initiatives at The Linux Foundation for the open source community.
Chris DiBona, Director of Open Source & Making and Science, Google
Heather E. McGowan, Future of Work Strategist, speaking on the future of work and the human capital era.
Todd Moore, Vice President – Open Technology and Developer Advocacy & Chief Technology Officer, DEG, IBM
Royal O’Brien, Game Tech Chief Evangelist, Amazon, speaking on the new Open 3D Engine Foundation.
Sanath Kumar Ramesh, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, OpenTreatments Foundation, sharing on OpenTreatment’s life-altering
initiative.
Brent Schroeder, Head of Office of CTO, Americas Chief Technology Officer, SUSE
Window Snyder, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Thistle Technologies, discussing IoT security.
Kate Stewart, Vice President of Dependable Embedded Systems and Dr. David A. Wheeler, Director of Open Source Supply Chain Security, The Linux Foundation, speaking on supply chain security.
Linus Torvalds, Creator of Linux & Git, in conversation with Dirk Hohndel, Vice President & Chief Open Source Officer, VMware, discussing 30 years of Linux.
Chris Wright, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Red Hat
The full schedule of sessions will be announced on July 22, with additional keynotes also being announced in the coming weeks.
Registration (in-person) is offered at the early price of $850 through July 27. Registration to attend virtually is $50. Members of The Linux Foundation receive a 20 percent discount off registration and can contact events@linuxfoundation.org to request a member discount code. Applications for diversity and need-based scholarships are currently being accepted. For information on eligibility and how to apply, please click here. The Linux Foundation’s Travel Fund is also accepting applications, with the goal of enabling open source developers and community members to attend events that they would otherwise be unable to attend due to a lack of funding. To learn more and apply, please click here.
Health and Safety
In-person attendees will be required to be fully vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus and will need to comply with all on-site health measures, in accordance with The Linux Foundation Code of Conduct. To learn more, visit the Health & Safety webpage and read our blog post.
Sponsor
Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference 2021 is made possible thanks to our sponsors, including Diamond Sponsors: Google, IBM, Microsoft and Red Hat, Platinum Sponsors: Huawei, Snyk, and SUSE, and Gold Sponsors: SODA Foundation, Styra, WhiteSource and Witekio. For information on becoming an event sponsor, click here or email us for more information and to speak to our team.
Press
Members of the press who would like to request a press pass to attend should contact Kristin O’Connell.
About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 2,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit linuxfoundation.org.
The Linux Foundation Events are where the world’s leading technologists meet, collaborate, learn and network in order to advance innovations that support the world’s largest shared technologies.
Visit our website and follow us on Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook for all the latest event updates and announcements.
The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
###
Media Contact
Kristin O’Connell
The Linux Foundation
koconnell@linuxfoundation.org
The post The Linux Foundation Announces Keynote Speakers for Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference 2021 appeared first on Linux Foundation.