Sustaining OSS projects and communities over the long-term can be a challenge. Project leaders, maintainers, and contributors are busy people who don’t always have the time or experience to focus on growing a community and maintaining their software. Using metrics is one way to help OSS projects identify potential issues and identify areas where they can improve their community to make it more sustainable over the long-term. Being proactive about improving sustainability before it becomes a crisis can help make our software more sustainable and reliable for all of us. However, not everyone has the experience or skills required to know how to interpret their metrics and use what they learn to make improvements within their community.

The CHAOSS project has been creating a series of MIT licensed Practitioner Guides focused on improving the sustainability of our software and communities. The guides are designed to make it easier for people to draw meaningful and actionable insights using community metrics, even when those people do not necessarily have a deep background in data analysis or much experience working within OSS communities.

This talk will identify several categories of metrics from the Practitioner Guide Series, including responsiveness, contributor sustainability, organizational participation, and security. This session will cover not just how to interpret the metrics, but will focus on providing ideas for improving in areas identified using the metrics. The audience will walk away with a better understanding of how to use metrics to proactively improve the long-term sustainability of their OSS projects and communities.