Open Source Summit Europe 2024

Information about open source project users and usage characteristics can be an invaluable tool for maintainers and project leaders to prioritize support for features and old versions, as well as understand how users engage with their project. However, many open source users see incorporating telemetry into a project as an invasion of privacy. Within the CHAOSS community, we discuss and define metrics to understand and measure project health. Many of these same metrics can be used to infer characteristics about project users as they are part of the extended community. In this talk, we will discuss what we can and can’t learn about our users from existing publicly available metrics while respecting the privacy of our communities.