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Kinds of openness twitter directive
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choldgraf committed Mar 23, 2023
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Expand Up @@ -14,7 +14,8 @@ as a marketing term to increase support, users, or resources.

I was thinking about this the other day, so decided to take to twitter:

{% twitter https://twitter.com/choldgraf/status/1054478362209480704 %}
```{socialpost} https://twitter.com/choldgraf/status/1054478362209480704
```

I was surprised at how much this question resonated with people. Here are a few
highlights from the (very interesting) conversation that came out of that question.
Expand All @@ -26,7 +27,8 @@ highlights from the (very interesting) conversation that came out of that questi
Tal immediately brought up a really important point: many projects *want* to be
inclusive and welcoming to others, but they don't have time to do so.

{% twitter https://twitter.com/talyarkoni/status/1054484496769314818 %}
```{socialpost} https://twitter.com/talyarkoni/status/1054484496769314818
```

I think this is an important distinction, and something that should be signaled
clearly. One the one hand, if a person generally wants others to contribute to
Expand All @@ -47,7 +49,8 @@ That leaves open the question: "how do we measure the **practical** openness of
rather than just what it **says**?". A few folks mentioned that the CHAOSS project
does a lot of work in this gneeral space:

{% twitter https://twitter.com/abbycabs/status/1054492219808403457 %}
```{socialpost} https://twitter.com/abbycabs/status/1054492219808403457
```

CHAOSS defines standards for metrics to collect about communities. They don't necessarily
say what others should **do** with those metrics, so perhaps that's on the open community
Expand All @@ -68,7 +71,8 @@ project have a permissive license."

There was also a specific metric around governance that's worth highlighting:

{% twitter https://twitter.com/GeorgLink/status/1054621070945329152 %}
```{socialpost} https://twitter.com/GeorgLink/status/1054621070945329152
```

The paper linked above is a study that investigated "open governance" in a number of
open-source mobile projects. It's an interesting exploration of the ways that
Expand All @@ -79,7 +83,8 @@ conclude that "more open" projects are most-likely to be successful in the long
Finally, apparently there's also a "badge" to signal the status of a repository (is it
active, vaporware, abandoned, etc):

{% twitter https://twitter.com/parente/status/1055053470808580098 %}
```{socialpost} https://twitter.com/parente/status/1055053470808580098
```

I'd love to see more of these semi-automated signals to help guide the open source community
in deciding what projects to adopt and contribute to. As more and more people do
Expand All @@ -92,7 +97,8 @@ make these decisions easier.
One of the most fascinating links I found was Mozilla's "archetypes of open projects"
document:

{% twitter https://twitter.com/neuromusic/status/1054517145436975104 %}
```{socialpost} https://twitter.com/neuromusic/status/1054517145436975104
```

Briefly, this is an internal document that Mozilla made public. It attempts to define
the different kinds of open projects that exist. Importantly, it also explains the
Expand All @@ -109,7 +115,8 @@ On that note, I want to give a brief shout-out to Mozilla in general, which has
either conducted or sponsored a bunch of interesting work in open projects.
For example, they have a whole wiki dedicated to working openly:

{% twitter https://twitter.com/alex__morley/status/1054483982040121344 %}
```{socialpost} https://twitter.com/alex__morley/status/1054483982040121344
```

and they also run lots of training and community programs such as the
[Mozilla Open Leaders](https://foundation.mozilla.org/opportunity/mozilla-open-leaders/) program.
Expand All @@ -120,7 +127,8 @@ Project Jupyter is in this year's cohort and [keeping track of its progress here

A final note on the importance of ethnography:

{% twitter https://twitter.com/mmmpork/status/1054745690897711104 %}
```{socialpost} https://twitter.com/mmmpork/status/1054745690897711104
```

For all of my talk about metrics above, I've come to appreciate that numbers
are **never** sufficient to describe the complexities of a community or group.
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