CHAOSS Weekly Hangout, 23 Feb 2020

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: Navigating Community Health Through Comparison | Kevin Lumbard | CHAOSScon EU 2020

Description

Navigating Community Health Through Comparison

In this presentation, we share stories from 30 plus interviews on community health and offer our insights from engagement with the CHAOSS project. In particular, we focus on how people use comparisons in the determination of project health. To make solutions actionable, placing open source project metrics into the specific contexts where they are consumed is critical. When open source project contributors compare one open source project to another, they get a sense of how they are doing, relatively speaking. The comparison is social insofar as people draw comparisons between projects that are similar in terms of personnel or other key characteristics; projects they are socially familiar with. Through comparison, open source project contributors identify metrics that draw essential contrasts, and through these contrasts evaluate the likelihood of continued success or failure for their projects of interest.

Slides: https://chaoss.github.io/website/CHAOSScon/2020EU/slides/navigating_health_sc.pdf

-----
Kevin Lumbard
Doctoral Student Researcher - University of Nebraska at Omaha
@Paper_Monkeys

Kevin is a doctoral student at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Kevin is an active participant in the CHAOSS community. His research is concerned with collaborative design and community health metrics.

-----
About CHAOSScon

Learn about open source project health metrics and tools used by open source projects, communities, and engineering teams to track and analyze their community work. This conference will provide a venue for discussing open source project health, CHAOSS updates, use cases, and hands-on workshops for developers, community managers, project managers, and anyone interested in measuring open source project health. We will also share insights from the CHAOSS working groups on Diversity and Inclusion, Evolution, Risk, Value, and Common Metrics.
https://chaoss.community/chaosscon-2020-eu/

A

I'm Kevin I'm presenting an editing community help for comparison, so this presentation is based on research that we've been doing for the past three years. We've conducted approximately 80 interviews. We've we've conducted approximately 80 interviews with people interesting. We helped many of you in this room were part of those interviews. So thank you, I'd like to acknowledge, Sean and Matt. Both part of the research team and the art is not on. The list is probably conducted about half of those interviews.

A

So a little bit of background on me, I've been working on the chaos project for about three years: I'm, a PhD student at the University of Nebraska Omaha and as a PhD student I, need to make sure that I'm progressing and assessing how well I'm doing, but how can I make it? How could I know?

A

Interestingly, as a PhD student, I'm, judged almost completely by the number of publications I have that metric is tied to my ability to get a job in academia when I'm done so how do I know how many publications I need right? How do I know what quality those publications need to be? One way to do that is to actually look at my peers right, and we call that social comparison right. So social comparison. It's part of nature right. We assess who we are by by looking our peers.

A

They have people around this I'm taller than you I'm shorter than you. You have a nice beard. Perhaps I aspire to have.

B

A

As nice as heroes, by comparing ourselves to others, you get a sense of how well we're doing right. We compare ourselves because it provides us wait a minute. Our current status identify aspirations it. It allows us to identify people or things with which we would like to like model ourselves after right. So.

A

But we don't actually we don't live in isolation, right teams and organizations are inherently social and the comparative process doesn't really stop at the individual level right. So in our interviews, we talk to a lot of people about how they they use and define community health metrics and in almost every single one of them. They all mention comparison.

A

So communities use a comparison to understand community health for the same reason that individuals do and once again the reason why they do. That is pretty clear right. If you want to know how well we're doing what our status is, we want to identify goals things that we'd like to become, but knowing why we'd compare doesn't really tell us how we compare so within the interviews that we've conducted I'd, like to kind of provide you some insight into how we use social comparison to define metrics.

A

So the first step is, we find communities to compare with right. So one thing that continually came up in the interviews is that we we like to make apples-to-apples comparisons right.

A

We want to compare communities that are similar to ourselves or similar to the projects we're on, and there is an aversion to comparing communities that we think may be different.

A

So search for comparable communities often begins with kind of a broad community generalization, and then we narrow the focus down to similar key components between communities.

A

Community members rely on their personal histories to understand and give context to these community health indicators and, interestingly, almost everyone. We talked to cautioned us that that their project was completely unique and defies comparison.

A

So so, while we can't maybe compare one project to another, what we can do is compare similar community components right, so just keep processes that may be similar or we may be able to identify one or two health indicators that we can take from community community.

A

So when we narrow our focus to these similar components, we begin to define health metrics that allow us to compare our communities within a similar context.

A

Through this comparison, community members become aware of how other communities are using health metrics. This awareness leads to adoption. The adoption of health metrics actually leads to a process of creation and adoption. That's iterative. It just builds on itself, though, while we'd, while we start to adopt similar health metrics, the interpretation of these Health metrics remains a community or organizational issue right. We can only interpret it at our community level so by identifying and defining health metrics. What we're doing is we're actually creating some uniformity in the way that we make these comparisons all right.

A

We do this by identifying health metrics that may work for a broad set of communities. They may be transferable across several communities, but when we do that, we we exclude- and we ignore other possible metrics.

A

So it's really important to remember that uniformity is going to cause us to it's, possibly potentially important health indicators.

A

However, we have to create this uniformity, because in creating this uniformity, we create similarities that allow us to make these comparisons.

A

And then further one of the interesting things we noticed about comparison from the interviews is that there is often an element of competition in a right, and competition requires a similar set of rules, a level playing field so to create that level playing field. We we form similar associations so that we can begin to compete with one another.

A

So, for example, you wouldn't compare a basketball team to a football team like they play by they play by different rules, and you wouldn't play you wouldn't compare a premier football team to a youth football team in your in your town right. The level of competition is different, so in open source, the health metrics we just defined for our communities provide a competitive signal of value which allows us to say things like that project over there that that's very successful or my project is better than yours, which it's probably something.

A

We all think, but maybe you're too polite to say.

A

So the adoption of these shared health metrics from comparison gives us a sense of where we're at which allows us to make better decisions about the use, whether to contribute or whether they want to invest in in an open source community. These shared health indicators create a common language that we can use to provide directions or help us find them later help others find a way. So where do we go from there or here?

A

If you want to know what the community is healthy? Who better to ask than the locals right? They understand their community better than anyone else, and they usually know the best restaurants in town right.

A

So when we're navigating open source communities, we find these these health metrics and these health metrics can act as reference points that that can help get us to where we need to go and as we define these Community Health metrics we're often going to revisit communities that we think are healthy and we're the maps to help others visit those communities and building maps. I think is, is why we're we're all here today so, and that is actually that it's all I have for you. Thank you for listening to my talk.

B

What are those common complimentary said? You came up with that's a good question, so.

A

What are the common health metrics that uh that I, that that I was referring to so so we do have some. We have identified some common health metrics from that, and many of them actually become part of the chaos where these felt factors, but in general this was a presentation where on how we define them, but not look which ones were defined so I I. Don't have that list. For you sure, if you're really interested I could probably scrape that and give you the list of all the metrics that were.

A

No more questions on there ahead of schedule.