Collaboration as Health Indicator

Open source communities are people. Participants, contributors, and users are some of the roles that we already know and we have acknowledged some of them in the existing CHAOSS [Community Health Analytics for Open Source Software] work. CHAOSS is the leading OSS community with the mission of learning and sharing insights about OSS health. The very existence of public profiles developing software with whom you can interact, make decisions together, and discuss next steps is important up to the point that the alternative is to have close governance communities with low interaction and lack of initiative. Some OSS foundations and OSS projects are indeed stating the importance of these other artifacts as key to a good open governance policy (as for instance the Four Opens by the Open Infra Foundation) and having those discussions in a transparent, public, and open way is part of their culture. How can this be translated into action? Collaboration. And how can we measure collaboration? This talk aims at providing an initial set of existing use cases where collaboration is used as a healthy community metric, an initial list of them related to the collaboration concept, and some existing software you can use to visualize them.

Transcript

1. Software Development Analytics Collaboration as Health Indicator OSS Summit Latin America 2022 Daniel Izquierdo Cortázar Miguel Ángel Fernández
2. Analytics Specialist & Consultant @ Bitergia CEO @ Bitergia Governing Board @ CHAOSS VP @ InnerSource Commons Foundation
3. Collaboration (from Latin com- "with" + laborare "to labor", "to work") is the process of two or more people, entities or organizations working together to complete a task or achieve a goal. Wikipedia dixit
4. Welcome to Open Source Communities!
5. What does look like collaboration in open source projects?
6. Data mining process and visualizations powered by GrimoireLab, a CHAOSS project
8. Dots are developers Squares are repositories Edge exists if a developer has contributed to a repository
9. Some visualization highlights across communities
10. Collaboration vs Isolated Projects
11. ‘Continent’ communities vs Archipelago
12. 1 Project Developer vs Many Projects Developer
13. High density areas vs lighter ones
14. Knowledge silos, continent communities
15. Organizational Diversity, areas of expertise
17. Projects are interconnected Organizations and developers engage at different levels OSS projects without contributors are dead OSS projects without collaboration are dead What is a healthy collaboration?
18. Let’s try to formalize this discussion Let’s see if we can measure collaboration
19. What is a graph? Representation of a network as a set of connected elements
20. Creating collaboration networks (I)
21. Creating collaboration networks (II)
22. How to measure collaboration from a network? Which properties of the network can help us to measure collaboration? Which metrics should we consider?
23. Applying Graph theory: Network properties Adjacency Two nodes are adjacent if there is an edge between them. Two edges are adjacent if they share one of their ends. Degree The degree of a node is the number of connections that it has to other nodes in the network. Connectivity A node is reachable from another node if there is a path between them. A graph is connected if there is a path for every pair of nodes in the graph.
24. Applying Graph theory: Centrality metrics Betweenness centrality A way of detecting the amount of influence a node has over the flow of information in a graph. It is often used to find nodes that serve as a bridge from one part of a graph to another.
25. Analyzing a real network (I) Contributors Projects Degree The amount of connections from a Contributor node indicates they collaborate in many projects. Connectivity A highly-connected network indicates a more collaborative community. Adjacency Contributor nodes sharing edges to Project nodes indicate collaboration among these people.
26. Analyzing a real network (II) Contributors Projects Betweenness Centrality Finding the contributors connected to a greater number of projects help us find the people acting as bridges in the community.
27. Collaborating to define Collaboration
28. Community Health Analytics for Open Source Software https://chaoss.community
29. Metrics Software Implementation agnostic community development metrics OSS Tools to Analyze (OSS) Software Development Projects Certain Intersection
30. Metrics Implementation agnostic community development metrics Work in Progress @ Metrics Models Working Group Join #wg-metrics-models @ CHAOSS Slack
31. Software OSS Tools to Analyze (OSS) Software Development Projects https://chaoss.github.io/grimoirelab/ Raw data Identities DB Enriched data Incremental datasets Historical data Focus on data, not on mining processes OSS metrics lake Metrics ready for consumption 30+ Data sources
32. Extra Collaboration Metrics in Action [by Bitergia]
33. https://innersourceportal.santander.com Bitergia in Action: Santander InnerSource Metrics
34. From Art to Science: The Evolution of Community Development. Diane Mueller and Daniel Izquierdo. IEEE Software Volume: 36, Issue: 6, Nov.-Dec. 2019 https://www.cncf.io/blog/2020/08/04/a-guide-to-untan gling-the-cncf-cross-community-relationships/ “Scaling management skills by 10x thanks to data insights” Discover developer interrelations, onboard newcomers faster, and align project expectations and releases. Bitergia in Action: Red Hat and CNCF
35. https://report.mozilla.community/ “[...] holistic view of our contributor ecosystem’s network structure, health and impact [...]” “[...] we’re able to visually describe these distinct contributor communities as well as how they are interconnected [...]” Bitergia in Action: Mozilla Rebel Alliance
36. Daniel Izquierdo Cortázar Miguel Ángel Fernández Email ydizquierdo@bitergia.com mafesan@bitergia.com Contact Us