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**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Thank you. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, thanks. |
**Stormy Peters:** Thank you. |
**Break**: \[30:08\] |
**Jerod Santo:** So we're here with Dawn Foster from VMware. How are you doing? |
**Dr. Dawn Foster:** I'm good, thanks. Thanks for having me. |
**Jerod Santo:** What do you enjoy about conferences like these? What's your favorite part? |
**Dr. Dawn Foster:** Oh my God, it's the people. So you get to run into people that you've known for years, you get to meet new people, and you get to reconnect with people, you get to have interesting conversations... And when we were all virtual, through, the pandemic and lockdowns and things, it just wasn't the same... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, maybe not drag... But did she drag you? |
**Dr. Dawn Foster:** No, she didn't drag me. She very kindly asked me if I would like to do one right now. |
**Jerod Santo:** I watched you guys walk over; you were a willing party... |
**Dr. Dawn Foster:** \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** So Kara was telling me that your Ph.D. had something to do with the Linux Kernel... And I was like "Tell me more", and that's all I got so far. So can you tell me more? |
**Dr. Dawn Foster:** Yeah, absolutely. So a few years ago I decided for my midlife crisis I was going to move to London on a student visa, and get a Ph.D. And so I found a university I liked, the University of Greenwich in London, and they had a center for business and network analysis, and I pitched them an idea to do... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Three and a half years... |
**Dr. Dawn Foster:** Yeah, because that's what a Ph.D. takes. |
**Jerod Santo:** Wow. |
**Dr. Dawn Foster:** Or - it can take more, but I did it in three and a half. But yeah, so I looked at collaboration within the Linux Kernel, I look mostly at mailing lists, because that's how the Linux Kernel works; they don't use GitHub, it's not pull requests, it's patch diffs, mailed back and forth on the mailing l... |
**Jerod Santo:** What did you learn? |
**Dr. Dawn Foster:** So it's interesting... I also did interviews with some of the Kernel developers... And one of the things that they'll tell you is that timezones don't matter. It doesn't matter where you're located around the world, it just doesn't matter. And turns out that's true. That's what the data showed, was... |
**Jerod Santo:** I wonder if there's something about public mailing lists... I guess maybe they allow this research to even take place, because a lot of other forms of communication potentially may have not been reachable by you as an outside analyst. Right? |
**Dr. Dawn Foster:** Yeah, exactly. So that's one of the beauties of open source, is that you've got all of the data, because it's all in the public. I mean, now - so I do some work within the CHAOSS project, and outside of the CHAOSS project as well, but I spent a lot of time in the GitHub API, and just pulling out da... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[37:58\] Poking and prodding. That's so cool. |
**Dr. Dawn Foster:** Poking and prodding, yes. |
**Jerod Santo:** So CHAOSS... This is Community Health... Help me out with the rest. |
**Dr. Dawn Foster:** Community Health Analytics for Open Source Software. So CHAOSS with two S'es. |
**Jerod Santo:** CHAOSSS... |
**Dr. Dawn Foster:** Yeah. So we basically -- I'll give you an overview of what CHAOSS is. We are a project and we're focused on kind of two things. We're focused on metrics, so defining metrics, so that we can be -- when we talk about a certain metric, that we can be consistent about what it is, and have a definition ... |
So we have two pieces of software within the CHAOSS projects. We have Augur and GrimoireLab. And those are both -- they're basically software projects that go out and they gather a bunch of data from various sources... So GitHub, obviously, Slack, and other things that you can -- basically, anything with an API that yo... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Pretty cool. |
**Jerod Santo:** So do you have some sort of a score, or how do you quantify the health? |
**Dr. Dawn Foster:** That is an excellent question. |
**Jerod Santo:** Thank you! |
**Dr. Dawn Foster:** No, we don't have a score. And I am anti-health scores. So what I like to look at when I'm looking at project health is I like to look at trends. So are you closing more of your pull requests? Is your pull requests backlog getting bigger or smaller? Are you responding to pull requests and issues mo... |
For example, if I work on a project and we're cutting a huge release, that has a bunch of breaking changes, there's probably going to be some weird things in the metrics associated with that... So pull requests, you're getting a backlog while you get everything together for the release, for example... |
I was talking to a friend at Google, Sophia Vargas, and she does a lot of analysis on things like Kubernetes. And some of the metrics that she was looking at made just no sense, because the way Kubernetes works is you've got bots that do all the things. So you have bots that respond to things automatically, the bots cl... |
**Jerod Santo:** It is normal to them. |
**Dr. Dawn Foster:** But unless you understand that, you can't interpret it; it doesn't tell you anything about the health of the project unless you understand what's going on within the project. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** So it's a hard job then, I guess, to quantify... And so when you say you like to look at trends, you're basically measuring the health of the project relative to its past health. Why is that beneficial, I guess? Just to see where they're headed, or -- I guess, who... I don't wanna say "Who cares?", but... |
**Dr. Dawn Foster:** \[42:22\] Yeah, so it depends. I think all of those people are end users of metrics. So part of the reason that I look at trends is because -- let's talk about from a VMware perspective, from a company perspective... |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. |
**Dr. Dawn Foster:** I want our maintainers to look at the projects and use the project health metrics to decide where they need to improve. So if they're responding to pull requests really quickly, then that's great. But if they're never closing any of those pull requests, maybe that's where they need to focus. So it ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. |
**Dr. Dawn Foster:** And the reason I like to focus on trends is because what I don't want is somebody getting all hung up because their number is going down, but maybe it's going down less quickly, or it's improving in some way. So they've already made some improvement. And I don't want people getting hung up on just ... |
And then I think when you're new to a community, and you're trying to decide whether you want to participate in a community, I think those are a whole different set of health metrics. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's a different set. |
**Dr. Dawn Foster:** Yeah. I mean, I think that's things like "Is anybody actually using this thing? I don't want to contribute to something nobody uses. Are there lots of other people contributing? Do all of those contributors work at the same company, and I don't work for that company? Am I even going to be welcome i... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How do you represent this data? Is it on a website, and I can go to a certain domain and a certain org name and a certain project name? Is it like GitHub URL structure to get to this data? How could I go and find my projects that I'm interested in their data? How can I find that information? |
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