Last week, I pointed out some tips for understanding the statistical data associated with projects hosted at SourceForge. There are all sorts of metrics in place for determining how well a project is doing, including Web traffic, Subversion activity, and number of downloads. Open source business intelligence vendor JasperSoft plans to release a tool in the coming months which will use that data — and more — to determine the overall health of open source projects.
Nick Halsey, vp of marketing at JasperSoft, says the Community Vibrancy Index (CVI) is a great way for both users and project volunteers to gain insight into a project’s immediate usefulness and long-term stability.
“The CVI can be used by any open source project that wants to track the health of its community,” says Halsey. “That information can be useful as a project tries to determine if it is providing the rights levels of resources, tools, etc to meet the needs of their community. It can also be useful to open source users who are trying to sort through the vast number of open source projects to find the ones that are truly leading the market, and that will be around for the long haul, and are viable for use in the user’s software development projects.”
In addition to culling statistical data from SourceForge, the CVI also pulls in other activity measurements such as community site visits, forum posts, number of registered community members, and page views. “We are trying to measure overall community vibrancy, leveraging what we can from a variety of software maturity models such as the Open BRR (business readiness rating),” says Halsey.
He notes that, although the number of times a project has been downloaded is often cited as proof a strong community or userbase, that number can be “manipulated or mis-represented.” Halsey says the CVI will factor in a wide variety of data to give a truer picture of how a project is faring. “The CVI … is intended to provide a balanced, unbiased measure of the overall health of the community around any given project. ”
JasperSoft plans to release the tool by the end of June under a Creative Commons license.