The health of an Open Source community is an important decision factor when considering the adoption of an Open Source software or when monitoring a seeded Open Source project. In this presentation, we will show the practical use of various quantitative approaches for community health assessment including social network analysis and domain analysis.
We give examples of data sources that are useful to analyse, including mailing lists, CVS/SVN repositories, and bug tracking systems. Furthermore, we elaborate approaches for how involvement of different community roles can be analysed, including core developers and professional providers. From this we can obtain a deeper understanding of professional involvement in professional Open Source communities. In our analysis we primarily give examples for Nagios, which is a tool for monitoring IT infrastructure that has been used in many professional
organisations and mission critical systems.
Dr. Jonas Gamalielsson has a background in bioinformatics and has been doing research on quantitative aspects of Open Source communities for a couple of years. His research is reported in over 20 publications in a variety of international journals, conferences and workshops. He participated in the organisation of the Fifth International Conference of Open Source Systems (OSS 2009), which was held in Skövde, Sweden.