Who are we?

CHAOSS is an open source project at the Linux Foundation focused on creating analytics and metrics to help define community health. Work in the CHAOSS Project community is largely organized around software and metrics.

Why Create CHAOSS?

The importance of open source software is no longer in question and its importance raises important questions about how we understand the health of the open source projects we rely on. Unhealthy projects can have negative impacts for the community involved in the project as well as organizations that rely on such projects. In response, people want to know more about the open source projects they are engaged with. For example:

• Open source contributors want to know where they should place their efforts and know that they are making an impact.
• Open source communities want to attract new members, ensure consistent quality, and reward valuable members.
• Open source companies want to know which communities to engage with, communicate the impact the organization has on the community, and evaluate the work of their employees within open source.
• Open source foundations want to identify and respond to community needs, evaluate the impact of their work, and promote communities.

In response to these issues, the CHAOSS project develops metrics, practices, and software for making open source project health more understandable. By building measures of open source project health, CHAOSS seeks to improve the transparency and actionability of open source project health so that relevant stakeholders can make more informed decisions about open source project engagement.

What are CHAOSS Goals?

The project goals are to:

• Establish standard implementation-agnostic metrics for measuring community health
• Produce integrated open source software for analyzing software community development
• Develop programs for the deployment of metrics not attainable through online trace data
• Build reproducible project health reports