Technical scoping: What are the values, priorities, and goals for CollectOSS?

[cdolfi]

We have the opportunity to establish what the community priorities are from a technical lens. Is modularity important? What do we want to aim to collect on long term? What does code quality mean for us? These are just some example questions, anything technical is open for discussion!

[MoralCode]

One that i just thought of : at least at a technical level maybe there's a way we can somehow define "human-directed work" or "human-understood work" as a value

Pros:

• fits neatly along the same lines as our existing open, community-first development practices/governance
• Further clarifies that our work is intended to help humans understand the health of the communities (made up of humans) behind the open source projects they rely on

Cons:

• the specific wording could be workshopped some more. "human directed" could include directing an Agentic tool to reimplement the repo in a new language, which very much would fly in the face of/be disrespectful to our own community, but at the same time, I think there should be room for us to explore the benefits of AI in various ways, as long as ultimate responsibility/understanding of the system still rests with a human contributor/maintainer.

[MoralCode]

vibes: if CHAOSS's goal (in an oversimplified way) is to standardize the metrics, maybe CollectOSS's goal (in a somewhat oversimplified way,) is to standardize how those metrics are queried/accessed

[MoralCode]

#370 i think contains a lot of good ideas in the form of our contribution standards.

[MoralCode]

Another value we should encode: CHAOSS as a whole seems to strongly prefer not to do any interpereting of metrics for users. we just present the data honestly and people can judge it for themselves in the context of their community (AKA we dont want a single "health" score). essentially "let the user do the interpreting of the metrics"

maybe that should be a project value too?