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Who is CHAOSS?
CHAOSS (Community Health Analytics Open Source Software) is an open-source community initiative that develops metrics, models, and software for measuring and evaluating the health and sustainability of open source projects, with a focus on usage by organizations that rely on or participate in open source ecosystems.
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- Open, community-defined metrics for open source project health and sustainability
- Working groups focused on specific metric domains such as Diversity & Inclusion, Risk, and Value
- Reference implementations and tooling for collecting and visualizing project health data (analytics/observability)
- Documentation, metric models, and use cases for organizations managing open source engagement and strategy
- Community governance, events, and collaboration spaces for practitioners of open source metrics
More About CHAOSS
CHAOSS (Community Health Analytics Open Source Software) is a Linux Foundation project that concentrates on defining, standardizing, and implementing metrics to assess the health, sustainability, and activity of open source software communities. Its work is used by enterprises, foundations, and open source program offices that need structured ways to understand participation, contribution patterns, and project stability across large portfolios of open source dependencies and collaborations.
The organization structures its work around themed working groups that each maintain curated metric sets and models. Examples include working groups on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Risk, Value, Burnout, Common metrics, and others, each with metric definitions, implementation hints, and reference data sources. These working groups produce consistently formatted metric descriptions that cover what is being measured, why it matters, how it can be implemented, and how to interpret the results. This structure supports adoption by engineering leaders, Open Source Program Office (OSPO) teams, and research teams that require repeatable, comparable measurements across multiple projects.
On the technology side, CHAOSS is associated with open source tooling that implements many of its metrics in practice (analytics/observability). These tools ingest data from platforms such as Git repositories, issue trackers, code review systems, and community communication channels, and then compute and visualize CHAOSS-aligned metrics. The tooling is designed to support dashboards and reporting that can be integrated into existing observability, business intelligence, or engineering analytics stacks used by enterprises and institutions.
Architecturally, CHAOSS metrics and models map to data that is already present in standard open source collaboration platforms and protocols, such as Git-based workflows, pull requests, issues, and mailing lists or chat systems. This allows organizations to deploy CHAOSS-aligned analytics without altering underlying development tooling. Instead, they connect data sources to CHAOSS-oriented software, configure metric collections that align with their governance or risk frameworks, and embed dashboards into internal reporting systems.
From a marketplace taxonomy perspective, CHAOSS belongs in categories such as open source program management, engineering analytics, and community health monitoring (analytics/observability). Its artifacts include metric catalogs, implementation guidelines, and reference software that support decisions on project selection, community investment, contributor support, and dependency governance. Enterprises use CHAOSS outputs to compare projects on engagement, responsiveness, diversity of contributors, issue resolution patterns, and other health dimensions, and to align open source participation with organizational compliance, risk management, and collaboration policies.
Our description of CHAOSS. Updated January 2026.
