CHAOSScast

Episode 51: Understanding the Community through Metrics - Carina C. Zona [Part 1 of 2]

Jan 28, 2022

44:04

Hello and welcome to CHAOSScast Community podcast, where we share use cases and experiences with measuring open source community health. Elevating conversations about metrics, analytics, and software from the Community Health Analytics Open Source Software, or short CHAOSS Project, to wherever you like to listen. Today, we are super excited to have as our guest, Carina Zona, who is the Head of Developer Relations for Toolchain, which is the lead sponsor of Pantsbuild open source project, as well as the Founder of CallbackWomen. Our discussions take us into Carina sharing her knowledge about some qualitative means of measuring and some culture around growing communities. Her passion has been trying to increase gender diversity in this industry as a side project on top of developer relations, and we learn what she’s been doing to help advocate this. We learn more about the Pants community, what this project is, and Carina tells us about adding the welcome channel on Slack and the quantitative work she’s doing on it using Savannah CRM. Download this episode now to find out much more, and don’t forget to subscribe for free to this podcast on your favorite podcast app and share this podcast with your friends and colleagues!

[00:02:27] Carina tells us her background and more about her project, CallbackWomen.

[00:05:52] The topic of data being self-reinforcing is discussed. Venia wonders how Carina approaches conversations with people who are so metrics focused.

[00:12:35] We learn all about the Pants community and what this project is all about.

[00:17:28] Carina fills us in on the who makes up the Pants community.

[00:21:29] Carina makes a clarification about Pants Build being written as an open source project in Python and the core engine written in Rust, and she speaks more about supporting languages and the effect it will have on who exists in your community.

[00:26:09] As the Pants community grows, Venia wonders what Carina has been doing to decide which aspects of that culture are working for the lurkers and silent majority in order to keep it when stakeholders choose to make decisions, and how does she make the decision between what to keep in the culture and what to let go.

[00:30:00] Venia wonders if Carina has considered using the welcome channel for purposes of direct measurement, and she goes in depth about how she’s doing quantitative work on it using Savannah CRM.

[00:34:19] Armstrong wonders if Carina thinks qualitative findings or evidence will challenge or support quantitative numbers she has. She also explains why the number is not important but what matters is the experience.

[00:39:01] Find out where you can follow Carina online.

Value Adds (Picks) of the week:

[00:40:40] Georg’s pick is a new tea pot he bought.
[00:41:26] Venia’s pick is finding a therapist that is okay with being online.
[00:42:00] Armstrong’s pick is getting selected to be AI chair at OpenInfra Summit Berlin 2022.
[00:42:26] Carina’s pick is her new puppy that brings her so much joy.

Panelists: