CHAOSS

CHAOSS
Name	CHAOSS
Formation	2017
Type	Working Group
Location	Global
Parent organization	Linux Foundation

CHAOSS

CHAOSS is a community-driven initiative for creating metrics and tools to assess open source project health, contributor behavior, and ecosystem sustainability. It brings together contributors from industry, foundations, research institutions, and volunteer communities to standardize measurements, develop software, and publish guidance used by projects, companies, and academic groups. Its work intersects with many organizations and projects across the open source landscape, influencing governance, tooling, and research.

Overview

The CHAOSS initiative produces frameworks, metrics and software to evaluate project vitality across dimensions such as participation, diversity, and productivity. Participants include representatives from the Linux Foundation, GitHub, GitLab, Apache Software Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Red Hat, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Facebook, IBM, Canonical (company), SUSE, Amazon (company), Oracle Corporation, VMware, Collabora, OpenStack Foundation, KDE, GNOME, Debian, Fedora Project, Open Source Initiative, BSA (The Software Alliance), Hyperledger, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Python (programming language), Node.js, Rust (programming language), Ruby (programming language), Linux Kernel, MariaDB Corporation, Mozilla Firefox, LibreOffice, TensorFlow, Jenkins (software), Ansible, Docker (software), Krita, Blender (software), PostgreSQL, MySQL, Grafana Labs, Elastic (company), HashiCorp, Canonical Ltd., SUSE LLC, OpenStack, Ceph, Ceph Foundation, Zabbix SIA, Perl, Hadoop, Apache Hadoop, Spark (software), Jenkins, Travis CI, CircleCI, GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins X, Gerrit, Phabricator.

History

The project emerged amid growing interest in quantitative analysis of open source projects, catalyzed by collaborations among foundations, corporations and academic teams. Early discussions involved contributors from Linux Foundation initiatives, Apache Software Foundation projects, and academic labs at institutions like Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Cambridge, ETH Zurich, University of Oxford, University of Toronto, University of Washington, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Harvard University, Princeton University, University of Michigan, Cornell University, University of California, San Diego, Imperial College London, National University of Singapore, Tsinghua University, Peking University, University of Sydney, University of Melbourne, University of Edinburgh, KU Leuven, Delft University of Technology, University of São Paulo, Politecnico di Milano, ETHZ researchers. Influences and inspirations included projects and papers from the European Commission research programs, reports by World Bank, analyses by Forrester Research, case studies from Gartner, and practices used within Red Hat and Google engineering organizations. CHAOSS organized working groups, produced whitepapers, and contributed to events at conferences such as FOSDEM, OSS Summit, Open Source Summit, KubeCon, All Things Open, PyCon, EuroPython, LinuxCon, SCaLE, Scale by the Bay, SREcon, ICSE, FAccT, CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, WWW Conference, NeurIPS, Strata Data Conference, Open Source Strategy Forum, and OSCON.

Metrics and Measurement Framework

CHAOSS defines conceptual frameworks and concrete metrics to capture contributor activity, project responsiveness, and community health. The framework supports measurement of contribution flow, issue and pull request lifecycles, bus factor, newcomer retention, contributor diversity, code churn, release cadence, and dependency risk. Implementation examples map to data sources such as GitHub, GitLab, Gerrit, Phabricator, Bugzilla, JIRA (software), Mailing lists, Discourse, Slack (software), Matrix (protocol), IRC, Stack Overflow, Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Meetup, Eventbrite, Zoom Video Communications, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom (software), Figma, Confluence (software), and Trello. The initiative cross-references community governance artifacts from entities like the Apache Software Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, and Linux Foundation to correlate governance events with metric trends.

Projects and Tools

Several open source tools have been developed or integrated to collect, process, and visualize CHAOSS metrics. Notable projects include analytics engines, dashboards, and libraries used by maintainers and researchers. Tools and platforms used in CHAOSS workflows include GrimoireLab, Augur (software), Bitergia, Kibana, Elasticsearch, Grafana, Metabase, Redash, Superset (software), Pandas (software), Apache Spark, Jupyter Notebook, R (programming language), Tableau, Power BI, D3.js, Plotly, Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, Airflow (software), Flask (web framework), Django (web framework), Node.js, React (JavaScript library), Vue.js, Angular (application framework), Bootstrap (framework), Terraform (software), Kubernetes, Docker (software), Helm (software), Prometheus, Grafana Loki, Sentry (software), New Relic, Datadog, Splunk, Snowflake Inc., BigQuery, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean, Heroku, Netlify.

Governance and Community

CHAOSS operates as a collaborative working group model with governance input from participating organizations and individual contributors. Its community engages through mailing lists, working groups, regular meetings, and presence at conferences and summits hosted by organizations such as the Linux Foundation, Apache Software Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, OpenStack Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, OWASP, OSI, ISOC, W3C, IEEE, ACM, SIGCHI, SIGPLAN, and regional groups. Contributors include maintainers from Kubernetes, TensorFlow, React (JavaScript library), Angular (application framework), Node.js, Rust (programming language), Python (programming language), Ruby (programming language), PHP, Perl, Go (programming language), and commercial engineering teams from Google, Microsoft, Amazon (company), Facebook, Red Hat, Intel.

Adoption and Impact

CHAOSS metrics and tools have been adopted by foundations, corporations, academic researchers, and independent maintainers to inform governance decisions, diversity initiatives, and resource allocation. Case studies and analyses have been presented at venues including Open Source Summit, KubeCon, FOSDEM, OSS Summit, ICSE, CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, FAccT, NeurIPS, Strata Data Conference, and published in outlets associated with ACM, IEEE, and university presses. Organizations leveraging CHAOSS-aligned approaches include Linux Foundation projects, Apache Software Foundation projects, Eclipse Foundation projects, Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects like Kubernetes and Prometheus, corporate engineering teams at Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, IBM, GitHub, GitLab, Red Hat, and research groups at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Toronto, ETH Zurich, and University of Cambridge.

Category:Free and open-source software organizations