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!