One goal of the governance document is to encourage participation from the entire open source ecosystem and especially other foundations and communities not hosted by the Linux Foundation.
The OSS Health Metrics group will be one part of a larger group that includes analytics software seeded by Grimoire Lab
The Governance document combines these efforts while giving each part-autonomy.
For the OSS Health Metrics group, an important aspect is to be technology agnostic and create metrics that can be implemented by anyone, including but not limited to Grimoire Lab.
The metrics specification, documentation, queries, and sample code would be licensed under MIT license.
Name of group is still not decided.
Metrics Conversation
One concern for creating metrics is that they will be used inappropriately.
Metrics cannot apply to all communities because they are all unique.
Possible inappropriate use: thresholds for metrics to determine maturity from an incubation process
Metrics should not be used for comparing communities.
Metrics can provide a sense of changes within the community.
For example, is a community gaining momentum or is it growing?
We might not create metrics that are human centered
Using metrics to compare contributors and maintainers might not be in our value framework
No one knows what the right metrics are for any given purpose
We might determine portfolios of metrics used in combination to measure something we all care about
For example:
Momentum
Growth
The metrics can be combined to inform our understanding of the above, but for each community, we might choose a different combination of metrics.
Next steps
We finalize the Governance document but don't wait for it.
We continue the conversation on the mailing list.
We open up the bi-weekly calls and post the information on the wiki page.
We propose a BoF session at the Open Source Summit North America 2017 in Los Angeles, CA - watch mailing list for draft.