Community metrics speak for themselves...
...are you listening?

The name CollectOSS (pronounced: collect us) was picked as a nod to the purpose of the project (collecting data on open source repositories) while being easy-to-remember. The OSS suffix is also intended to evoke a shared purpose with both CHAOSS and many other open source community projects whose names also end with OSS

Yes and no.

CollectOSS is a new project name and governance structure, but is building on top of existing community metrics work that has been developed under CHAOSS since 2018.

While both projects originally started from the same Python codebase, the two are now separate, independent projects with different governance and set of maintainers behind each. We are grateful to everyone who helped contribute to this project - both before and after the split.

CollectOSS is not an AI rewrite, it is a continuation of the same development work that came before it with a renewed focus on open, community-first development practices.

When a project representing a core function of the community suddenly moves, it can leave behind a vaccum. The impacts of such a change sends shockwaves through a community: Community data resources suddenly become unavailable; contributors can feel destabilized and disengage from the project; additional incident response work causes delays and splits maintainer time.

Creating a hard fork was not an easy choice, but in the vaccum of disruption, it became a necessary step to return a sense of stability to the CHAOSS community. CollectOSS represents an opportunity to strengthen the core values upon which we stand, shift our balance, and put in the work to rebuild the community with a more stable foundation so we can continue the valuable metrics work within CHAOSS.

For more details, see this announcement from the CHAOSS board.

CollectOSS focuses on collecting data from public git-based code hosting platforms ("forges") such as GitHub to help measure the social and community health of the human communities that are contributing to critical open source ecosystems.

The data CollectOSS collects covers more than just code contributions and extends to anything that can be derived from forge data, including comments, change reviews, releases, and other project activity.

For more information, see the "Our Scope" page in the CollectOSS Documentation

CollectOSS has introduced a governance process that is based on a template from the CNCF. This policy is available to anyone in the repository GOVERNANCE.md and codifies proven community-oriented procedures and policies for key functions such as: maintainer addition, maintainer removal, voting, governance changes, and more. Feedback is always welcome and changes to this document are possible with a ⅔ vote of the maintainers.

Anyone is welcome to utilize the official docs and README to get started with using CollectOSS.

If you would like to join the community, we welcome you to join the CHAOSS Slack in the #wg-collectoss-8knot channel. This is where you can chat with other contributors and maintainers to get help or decide if this is the right community for you!

To make your first contributions, take a look at the CONTRIBUTING file to learn how to make your first contribution. We especially encourage you to check out any issues with labels like "good first issues", "help wanted", or "first timers only"