Following on from my email earlier today, here’s my notion of what we could/should be doing around project health.
1) Project health dashboard. Measuring project health is notoriously difficult. There’s a whole organization (https://CHAOSS.community) that studies this - and perhaps we should be using their tools. But what’s important is to give projects metrics so that they can see trends and anticipate problems. This weekend I put up a quick dashboard that does this for all ASF projects - I sent a message about this yesterday - at https://boxofclue.com/comdev-metrics I think that ComDev should have an official project metrics service. This is cheap and easy. It took me a day and a half to put one together. But we also have a number of people here who do open source metrics as (part of) their day job. And there are a number of projects that already do metrics. We can certainly do better. Moreover, projects have asked for this kind of thing for years, and it falls squarely into our PMC mandate. 2) Early warning of at-risk projects Using the metrics dashboard, and also looking at the company influences on projects, anticipate inflection points in project health. That might look like declining interest in a technology, like a dominant company getting acquired, or too-high barrier to promoting new committers. I already do some of this analysis at work, and I know I’m not alone there. Our professional colleagues across the industry are doing this analysis on projects that their companies care about. Providing a central place where this analysis is done will be a service to our projects, and to the companies that depend on our project communities. We should find, and recruit, the people already doing this work inside company silos to come do it here. 3) Project outreach and support Proactively reach out to projects that are trending towards failure. Offer them advice, marketing and recruiting, and new contributor mentoring. Actively connect with companies that depend on these projects, and offer mentoring/coaching for their engineers, to bring them more into the life of the project, so that they are not merely consumers, but participants. Work with projects to hold new contributor onboarding sessions at various places around the world to fast-track getting these new contributors up to speed. (Several projects already do that, and we should be recruiting those people into ComDev, so that we can learn from them and amplify their effort to more projects.) We have a tendency, when people come and ask where they can get involved at the ASF, to point them to The Usual Projects which we already know are welcoming homes for new contributors. Identifying at-risk projects, and working with them to connect them with new contributors, will be higher impact and help turn the tide on (some of) those projects. All of these things *could* be done for $0. New contributor workshops could be something that we request budget for (venue, snacks, swag, collateral material, travel) and I have some ideas of how and where we could do that - mostly in conjunction with colleges and universities. Please speak up if you’re interested in this work stream. I think this has the potential to be the highest-impact thing that we could do, but we need someone to own it and help think about how it might work. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
