Open source communities are lively and organic ecosystems, which can seem chaotic even for those who are actively participating in them. Whether someone is a contributor, a user, or a spectator of a project, they all want their community to be balanced, successful and sustainable.

Metrics are often used to try to understand the dynamics of a project. Collecting and analyzing data can help with finding bottlenecks in processes, discovering new contributors, and much more. At the same time, large amounts of data can also become overwhelming and distract from the useful information behind it. The CHAOSS open source project was created to help define metrics to measure activity, find out more about bottlenecks and root causes of issues in open source projects, and more, while also helping people to understand how they can use the available metrics.

This session will provide a high-level overview of the CHAOSS project and metrics. Attendees will learn about the challenges of collecting and analyzing data, and practices to overcome them. Last but not least, the presentation will include a short case study to show how some of the CHAOSS metrics are collected and used at OpenInfra Foundation projects.