As expected, it has been an intense weekend in Brussels, participating in FLOSS Community Metrics meeting, and the stressful FOSDEM.
FLOSS Community Metrics meeting
On Friday, we participated in the FLOSS Community Metrics meeting, that has doubled the number of attendees from last year edition in Portland!!!
It has been great learning from Dawn Foster’s and Jesús González-Barahona’s talks about strategies and tools. We have some good insights about Debian from Stefano Zachiroli, and a very enjoyable presentation form Prof. Merelo about contributors on GitHub by city in Spain, with very funny moments…
During ligthning talks there were a bunch of very interesting presentations from developers, community managers, etc. On the Bitergia side, we presented the work that is being done in MARKOS Project about analyzing project licenses.
The meeting ended with a very interesting open discussion about the topic. The conclusions were clear, everyone is interested to know better what happens in their project, and metrics can help, but you must know how to use them. On the other hand, if we want transparency and work openly, the tools we use to produce these metrics should be free, open and transparent.
Last, it was announced that we are already working on a new meeting for July, close to OSCON dates… Stay tuned!
FOSDEM
On Saturday we participated, along with community managers from Puppet and Chef and more than 150 people, in an impromptu AMA session of questions and answers about the importance of metrics to determine the health of the community. It was rewarding to see that many of the metrics and services already available, were interesting for the people. In addition, services that we are working on, as analysis of activity in Meetup, were most requested, along with sentiment analysis.
On this last point, we have made some approximation, but for now we focus on highlighting where the most significant discussions take place, saving community managers from monitor all traffic from mailing lists or forums (like Askbot, StackOverflow, Discourse, etc.).
On Sunday, our colleague, Daniel Izquierdo took part in the lightning talks presenting GrimoireLib, Python library that represents the core Bitergia tools to provide metrics and reports.
And that has been almost all, from a very intense weekend, meeting with old friends, new colleagues, customers and many interesting people and projects… Let’s meet again in 2016!