General

CHAOSS Data Science Working Group

When I started in the role of Director of Data Science for CHAOSS, one of the first things I did was start the Data Science Working Group (WG) as a way to build community around the data science work that many of us were already doing within the CHAOSS project. I am incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished in less than 2 years.

Yesterday, we published a CHAOSS blog post about what we’ve been working on lately, but here are a few highlights.

We’ve released 7 Practitioner Guides: Introduction, Contributor Sustainability, Responsiveness, Organizational Participation, Security, Building Diverse Leadership, and Sunsetting an Open Source Project. I’ve covered these in more detail in 2 recent blog posts about Using CHAOSS Practitioner Guides to Improve your OSS Projects and From Data to Action: Building Healthy and Sustainable Open Source Projects.

We are also driving several research projects out of the working group. I’ve already blogged about the Relicensing and Forks research that I’ve been working on, but we also have research looking into projects that move from private ownership into a foundation, archived projects, and a collection of research taxonomies.

You can read the CHAOSS blog post to learn more!

I also wanted to remind people that like all of the CHAOSS working groups, the Data Science WG is open to everyone! All you need to join the Data Science WG is an interest in using data to understand the open source world around us. Most of our work is analysis of data, writing guides, and discussions about using metrics. You don’t need any special skills, and you don’t need to know any advanced statistics, machine learning, or AI. We’re even planning a CHAOSS Data Science Hackathon, which will be  co-located with Open Source Summit North America and CHAOSScon in Denver, CO on June 26, 2025. To learn more, visit our repository, join our meetings, or reach out to us in the #wg-data-science channel in CHAOSS Slack. We hope you’ll join us!

General

From Data to Action: Building Healthy and Sustainable Open Source Projects

Hands holding dirt with a small green flower growing out of it.

Last week, I had an article published in Computer magazine, an IEEE publication: From Data to Action: Building Healthy and Sustainable Open Source Projects (the PDF version is in an easy to read format). One of the primary ways that the CHAOSS project is helping people improve the health and sustainability of their open source projects is via the Practitioner Guide series, which I covered in more detail in the Computer article.

On a related note, we’ve published two new Practitioner Guides this week: Getting Started with Sunsetting an Open Source Project and Getting Started with Building Diverse Leadership! These new guides complement the previously released guides that I talked about in a recent blog post. The rest of this post has a few more details about the Computer magazine article and the two new guides.

In the Computer magazine article, I talked about how the CHAOSS project is providing advice and resources for proactively using metrics to improve open source project health and sustainability before a crisis occurs to make software more sustainable and reliable for everyone. Here’s a short quote from the Computer magazine article:

“Building sustainable open source projects over the long term can be a challenge. Project leaders, maintainers, and contributors are busy people who don’t always have the time to focus on growing a community along with maintaining their software. Using metrics is one way to help identify potential issues and areas where a project can be improved to make it more sustainable over the long term. Metrics are best used if they aren’t used once and never again. By monitoring the data over time, projects can understand trends that might indicate areas for improvement as well as see if those improvements are having the desired effect. Being proactive about improving sustainability before it becomes a crisis can help make open source software more sustainable and reliable for everyone” – Read the rest of the IEEE Computer magazine article for more.

The newest guide in the series, Practitioner Guide: Getting Started with Building Diverse Leadership, was written by Peculiar C. Umeh. It expands on the theme of improving health and sustainability of open source projects by creating a welcoming and inclusive environment that encourages contributions from a wide variety of people. Here’s a quote from the guide:

“A community or project with diverse leadership offers significant advantages because diverse leadership leverages diverse perspectives to build an innovative community, create a welcoming and inclusive environment, and empower individuals from all backgrounds to contribute their unique talents. New and existing contributors feel more included when they can see other people in leadership positions who are like them (Linux Foundation, 2021). When diverse leaders collaborate, their intersection sparks innovation and creates a more harmonious global leadership system. It represents a global and diverse user base, which improves the usability of the project because more users’ voices are represented in decision-making about the project’s design and functionality. It enhances decision-making processes by incorporating various viewpoints and experiences, leading to better problem-solving and more effective strategies. It promotes a culture of inclusion and respect, improving morale and engagement among community members and ultimately contributing to projects’ long-term success and sustainability.” – Read the Practitioner Guide: Getting Started with Building Diverse Leadership for more.

The other new guide in the series, Practitioner Guide: Getting Started with Sunsetting an Open Source Project, is also about making open source more sustainable by being clear about the future of an open source project so that users can make responsible decisions and avoid using open source technologies that are no longer being maintained or updated with security fixes. Here’s a quote from the guide:

“Many open source projects, even widely used ones, become abandoned for a variety of reasons (e.g., evolving interests, family situations, employment changes), but abandonment can be done in a responsible way by proactively sunsetting the project (Miller et al. 2025). Sunsetting is an important consideration for corporate environments where it can be easy to lose track of projects that were created by employees who later walked away from the project and left if abandoned. You don’t want abandoned open source projects with security vulnerabilities sitting in your organization’s source code repositories where someone might trust that project simply because they trust your organization. Finding inactive projects and responsibly sunsetting them is a good business decision and something that many open source teams / Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) do on a regular basis. It’s important to remember that not every open source project can or should exist forever: technologies evolve, corporate priorities change, and people’s interests change. Part of the beauty of open source is that we work in the open as we innovate, and some of those innovative projects will stand the test of time, while others should be responsibly deprecated via a sunset process. Sunsetting an open source project should take your user’s needs into account, and where possible, offer users time to migrate to a replacement technology. At a minimum, it’s important to signal that the project will no longer be maintained, updated, or have security patches so that users know that they should no longer be using the project.” – Read the Practitioner Guide: Getting Started with Sunsetting an Open Source Project for more.

As always, these CHAOSS guides are under an open source license, so you’re free to use and modify them to meet your needs.

Photo by Jennifer Delmarre on Unsplash.

General

New Power Dynamics in Open Source: Rug Pulls, Relicensing, and Forks

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year doing research into open source projects that have moved to proprietary licenses and the forks that were the result of those license changes. More recently (starting with a talk at Monki Gras), I’ve been thinking about how the power dynamics within the open source ecosystem have evolved and how rug pulls, relicensing, and forks can shift those power dynamics.

I finally wrote all of this down and turned it into a blog post for The New Stack: Clouds, Code, and Control: The New Open Source Power Struggle. Here’s a short quote from the post:

“With the rise in popularity of large cloud providers, the open source power dynamics are looking kind of similar to the feudalism example I talked about at the beginning of this blog post, but in the open source case, what’s different is that we have ways to shift or flip the power dynamics. A smaller company deciding to move a project away from an open source license can flip the power dynamic and gain power back from those large cloud providers. Still, they also shift the balance of power even further away from contributors and users at the same time when they decide to relicense that project. This encourages those with less power to take collective action to fork a project, flipping the power dynamic in favor of the contributors and users, often including the cloud providers as users. Within the open source world, we are better off than the peasants and serfs because we have certain freedoms that allow us to take collective action to regain power by forking projects when others abuse their power.” – read the rest of the blog post on The New Stack.

If you want to learn more about the research, here are a few places to get started:

Photo by Lance Reis on Unsplash

General

Using CHAOSS Practitioner Guides to Improve your OSS Projects

Within the CHAOSS project, we know that people often struggle to make productive use of the tsunami of data about open source projects. One of my focus areas over the past 2 years within the CHAOSS project has been to develop a series of Practitioner Guides designed to help develop insights that can be used to improve the project health of an open source project. So far, we have 5 guides: Introduction, Contributor Sustainability, Responsiveness, Organizational Participation, and Security with more guides coming soon.

I’ve written about these guides in an OpenSource.net blog post and recorded a CHAOSScast podcast about each guide. I’ve also done quite a few talks related to the topics in these guides, which can be found on my Speaking page. The most recent one was a joint talk with Peculiar C. Umeh at FOSS Backstage with a video that is available to watch.

I won’t go into more detail here, since I’ve already linked to other blog posts, podcasts, and talks on the topic, but I encourage you to have a look at the Practitioner Guides to find ways to make your open source projects healthier and more sustainable!

General

A New Chapter at CHAOSS

For my regularly scheduled (once every year and a half) blog post, I wanted to announce that July 3rd is my last day at VMware, and I will be joining the CHAOSS project as their new Director of Data Science. 

CHAOSS Logo

It was really hard to leave VMware after almost 5 years (including my time at Pivotal). The work was fun, and I worked with so many amazing people that I will miss dearly! But as many of you know, I have a deep passion for data, and in particular open source community metrics, so the opportunity to work full time on the CHAOSS project is the dream job that I just couldn’t turn down. I’ve been working in this space for 10+ years with the CHAOSS project, and before CHAOSS, I was working with Bitergia and a variety of open source tools that later evolved into the software that is now part of the CHAOSS project. I’ll be taking July off and then will be starting my role with CHAOSS in August. A big thank you to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for making this possible through the grant that is funding the Director of Data Science position and other CHAOSS project initiatives.

I will be continuing my work on the OpenUK Board and as co-chair for the CNCF Contributor Strategy Technical Advisory Group, which have kept me very busy in addition to my work at VMware and in my role on the CHAOSS Governing Board.

Over the past year and a half, I’ve done quite a few presentations on topics ranging from how companies can work in open source communities to open source health / metrics to leading in open source, which can be found on my Speaking page. The highlight was giving a keynote about growing your contributor base at KubeCon EU in front of an audience of 10,000+, which was amazing and terrifying at the same time! 

In addition to my world tour of conference presentations, I was quoted in a Linux Foundation Diversity Report, won a few awards for my UK work in open source as part of the OpenUK Honours list in 2021 and 2023, and I’ve written a few blog posts since my last post here on my own blog:

On the personal side, Paul and I bought a new house in November, and we have become the people who sit in their back garden and talk about how adorable the squirrels and birds are. Since we live in an area near quite a bit of green space, we have regular visits from foxes and even spotted one badger on our backyard wildlife camera! 

Since I don’t post here often, if you want to keep up with what I’ve been doing, I post occasionally on Mastodon and Instagram.

General

Speaking, Blogging, and More

It’s time again for my regularly scheduled (once every year and a half) blog post to avoid completely neglecting my personal blog. While I don’t blog often, I do still update my Speaking page on a regular basis, and conferences have really ramped up over the past couple of months! I’ll admit to being really tired of attending boring virtual events, so when the in-person events started back up, I went to all of them! In my rush of excitement about traveling and seeing people again, I agreed to do way too many talks – 10 talks in two months. Here are a few of the topics I’ve been talking about over the past year and a half, and you can visit my Speaking page to get links to slides and videos where available:

  • Navigating and mitigating open source project risk
  • Good governance practices for open source projects
  • Metrics and measuring project health
  • Becoming a speaker and getting talks accepted at conferences
  • Being a good corporate citizen in open source

I’ve also written quite a few blog posts on the VMware Open Source Blog and elsewhere on similar topics:

I’ve also been a guest on a few podcasts: Open Source for Business, a Brandeis webinar on Open Source and Education, Community Signal, and The New Stack. You can also find me as an occasional host for various metrics topics on episodes of the CHAOSScast podcast.

As part of my work on the OpenUK board, I was interviewed for a featured section about Open Source Program Offices in the report, State of Open: The UK in 2021 Phase Two: UK Adoption where I talked about VMware’s OSPO.

On a more personal note, we’ve been doing really well throughout the pandemic. We finally had our first real vacation in Malta, where we relaxed while eating and drinking our way through Malta along with swimming, snorkeling, reading, and enjoying the sunshine. I still keep an updated list of every book I read here on my blog if you’d like to know what I’ve been reading.

Since I don’t post here often, if you want to keep up with what I’ve been doing, I post more frequently on Twitter.

General

VMware and Other Updates

I realized that I haven’t posted anything in over a year and a half here, but I’ve definitely been busy! The biggest change is that Pivotal was acquired by VMware a few months ago, and I have moved into the Open Source Program Office as Director of Open Source Community Strategy where I continue to work remotely from my flat in the UK. I love my new job, and I get to work with a bunch of really amazing people! While I haven’t been blogging here, I have written several blog posts on the VMware Open Source Blog about building community and strategy.

I’ve been doing quite a few talks at conferences and other events, including some virtual ones, on a wide variety of topics including community building, open source metrics, Kubernetes, and more. Links to presentations and videos where available can be found on the speaking page.

I’m one of the rotating hosts for the new CHAOSScast podcast where we chat about a wide variety of open source metrics topics. I also wrote a post on the CHAOSS blog with a video that talks about how I’m using metrics at VMware to learn more about the health of our open source projects. If you’re as passionate about data and metrics as I am, CHAOSS is an open source community that welcomes contributors of all types, and it’s a fun group of people, so you should join us!

I’ve joined the OpenUK Board of Directors to help promote collaboration around open technologies (open source, open hardware, and open data) throughout the UK. We have weekly presentations that are free for anyone to attend every Friday, and we’re always looking for volunteers who want to help out on a wide variety of committees.

There are also a few other miscellaneous things that I’ve done recently:

I hope to see all of you around the internet, and maybe we’ll even be able to catch up in person after this silly pandemic is over!

General

Joining Pivotal

I’m super excited to be joining Pivotal on Monday, October 22nd as Open Source Software Strategy Lead within the R&D group here in their London office!

This has been in the works for quite a while, but my UK work visa finally arrived, which makes it official. I also learned that my PhD dissertation corrections were approved, so I’ve had a lot to celebrate in the past week!

My first day at Pivotal will be at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit in Edinburgh, which is odd timing because of some visa delays, but I’m excited to get started! While I won’t be speaking about anything related to my new job at Pivotal, I will be talking about my Linux kernel research.

And we’re hiring if you want to come work with me 🙂

career

Seeking My Next Adventure

My time as a PhD student is coming to an end, and I’m ready to get back into a full-time role at a tech company in July or August. I’ve included a tl;dr version next for those busy people who just want the highlights, or you can read on for more details about me and what I want in my next role.

What I’m looking for in my next adventure:

  • Open source focus: community management or data analysis of OSS participation
  • Senior position: preferably an individual contributor role, but open to managing a small team
  • Travel: some travel to speak at conferences, but a maximum of 10% – 20% of my time
  • Based near London: need a company to sponsor my UK work visa

What I’ve been doing in my past couple of roles (full resume):

  • Building and leading open source communities
  • Analyzing open source community metrics and other data
  • Speaking and blogging about a variety of technologies
  • Creating strategies and plans while leading a team to achieve them

Now for the longer version and more details about what I want for my next adventure …

After 3.5 years at the University of Greenwich, I’m almost finished with my PhD. While it has been an amazing experience, I am ready to exit academia and return to the tech industry again. Ideally, I would like to be back at work in July or August.

The catch is that I want to stay in the UK, so I’m looking for a full-time role with a company who can sponsor my UK visa. Given my timeline, this company would already need to be on the UK register of licensed sponsors for visas. The good news is that it should be fairly easy to transfer from my student visa to a work visa if I have company sponsorship. I live a bit outside of London, and while I could work in a London office, the commute would be over an hour, so I would prefer a position where I can work remotely most days. I’m happy to work a couple of evenings per week to accommodate meetings with US teams.

My primary job criteria is that I would like to continue to focus on open source software. A position in open source community management or data analysis of participation in open source communities would be ideal, but I’m also open to other roles. I’ve spent most of my 20+ year career working in open source software roles with a focus on community management and metrics, and I would really enjoy continuing that work and maintaining the relationships that I have with so many amazing people working in similar roles.

I have a preference for being in a senior individual contributor role. Over the past 20+ years, I’ve been in many different open source positions, so I can easily adapt to wide variety of responsibilities as the industry or team evolves. I’m also happy to train and mentor junior employees, which I view as a critical element of any senior position. At my last few companies, I managed teams, most recently as Director of Community at Puppet, so while I would prefer an individual contributor role, I am also open to managing a small team.

I also want to work for a great company where I can enjoy my work. I’m happy to work hard to achieve my goals, but I also expect to work a reasonable number of hours per week and prefer an environment with some flexibility about when and how I do my work as long as the goals are being met. The company should have a diverse workforce and a culture of showing respect for each other. I also prefer to work at a company that already understands the importance of open source software.

For years, I have been giving talks at conferences and blogging on a variety of technology topics, and I would like to continue to do this. In particular, I would like travel to open source conferences (Linux Foundation events, OSCON, FOSDEM, etc.) and give talks, but I need to keep the travel to 10% – 20% of my time.

Here are a few links with examples of my work and more details about my past experience:

If you think I would be a good fit for a role on your team, or if you have other pointers for me, please drop me an email: dawn@fastwonder.com.

conference

Extracting Data from Open Source Communities

On Sunday at FOSDEM, I have a 5 minute lightning talk about extracting data from open source communities in the HPC, Big Data, Data Science devroom (slides).

Open source communities are filled with huge amounts of data just waiting to be analyzed. Getting this data into a format that can be easily used for analysis may seem intimidating at first, but there are some very useful open source tools that make this task relatively easy.

Metrics GrimoireThe primary tools used in this talk are the open source Metrics Grimoire tools that take data from various community sources and store it in a database where it can be easily queried and analyzed.

Tools covered:

  • CVSAnalY to gather and analyze source code repository data
  • MLStats to gather and analyze mailing list data
  • Other Metrics Grimoire tools for bug trackers, IRC, Wikis and more
  • Gource to visualize source code repository data

MLStats and CVSAnaly – Installation and data import:

It’s very easy to get started with MLStats and CVSAnaly and use them to import data from your mailing lists and code repositories.

  1. Install

    2. $ python setup.py install

  2. Create database

    3. mysql> create database mlstats;
    
mysql> create database cvsanaly;

  3. Import data

    4. $ mlstats http://URLOFYOURLIST
    
$ cvsanaly2 /path/to/repo

MLStats – Queries to extract data:

  • Top 100 messages (most replied to threads):

    • SELECT subject, COUNT(*) as total 
FROM messages 
GROUP BY subject 
ORDER by total DESC 
LIMIT 100;

  • Other queries:

    • # of messages from a specific person

    • # of messages per person from email domain


    • Find all messages with specific word in subject line (patch)

    • More queries

CVSAnalY – Queries to extract data:

  • Number of commits per person by email domain:

    • SELECT p.name, p.email, 
COUNT(distinct(s.id)) as num_commits 
FROM people p, scmlog s 
WHERE email like "%company.com" 
AND p.id=s.author_id 
GROUP BY email 
ORDER BY num_commits DESC;

  • Other queries:

    • Top commit authors all time

    • # of commits for specific person
    • More Queries

Other Metrics Grimoire Tools:

Gource:

Gource is an amazing tool to visualize activity from your source code repositories. I did a full talk about Gource on Friday at the FLOSS Community Metrics meeting, so have a look at that blog post for details about using Gource.

Open source, research, and other stuff I'm interested in posting.