CHAOSScast Episode 41: Forecasting Sustainability with Vladimir Filkov and Likang Yin

About this Episode

CHAOSScast – Episode 41

Hello and welcome to CHAOSScast Community podcast, where we share use cases and experiences with measuring and improving 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 guests, Vladimir Filkov and Likang Yin. Vladimir is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis, as well as a Data Scientist and a Software Engineer. Likang is a third year PhD student at UC-Davis working with Professor Vladimir Filkov. They are joining us to talk about their research into forecasting sustainability of open source communities. Also, we learn about the challenges they faced, how they overcame them, how they are expanding their research to engage the community more, and what their goal is. Download this episode now to find out much more, and don’t forget to subscribe for free to this podcast and share this podcast with your friends and colleagues.

[00:02:01] Vladimir and Likang introduce themselves and tell us what they do.

[00:03:33] Vladimir tells us what his motivation was to look at open source sustainability.

[00:05:45] Sophia asks Vladimir how he thinks about the concept of sustainability since there are a lot of elements associated with that term. Sean asks if it’s binary in the sense that you get out of the incubator alive or you don’t. Vladimir talks about how the ASF is working with them.

[00:09:54] Vladimir and Likang talk about what their project covered and the key observations they had. We also find what they mean by Socio-technical and how they are thinking about what a Socio-technical system is.

[00:13:25] At CHAOSS, one thing they are talking about is recognizing all types of contributions, and Likang and Vladimir give their perspective on this and tell us about their mailing list. Also, learn what they found out and what’s predicting sustainability.

[00:16:17] Find out what LSTM means and what kind of modeling it is.

[00:20:20] Sean asks Vladimir to explain better what all this means to him as a Software Developer deciding on what open source project to contribute to or to him as a person trying to incubate a project and how these methods are helping so he can see it more clearly and explain it to his mom. Vladimir tells us the “Four Myths of Sustainability.”

[00:23:02] Sophia wants to know more about the assumptions of the people themselves and asks Vladimir if there’s a step before he starts finding his groups of people and if there’s any understanding of individual characteristics, motivation, or incentive that could also dictate the progression of that project.

[00:24:49] Sophia asks Vladimir how he normalizes for different kinds of governance models or if they’re all the same because they’re part of the incubator program. She also wonders how he’s addressing differences in size and whether or not it makes sense to model certain size groups of projects and how he’s handling that in Europe.

[00:29:25] Sean wonders when Vladimir thinks about groups, does he think about cognition and awareness of a group or does he think about other things.

[00:31:55] We learn about the challenges that Vladimir and Likang faced and how they overcame them. Also, we learn about their research and how they are expanding it to engage the community more, and what their goal is.

[00:40:13] Georg asks for Vladimir’s perspective on what he sees CHAOSS as a project providing now, where does he think CHAOSS should go in the future as a project, and what can they do to support their work.

[00:44:10] Find out where you can follow Vladimir and Likang online.

Value Adds (Picks) of the week:

[00:45:33] Georg’s pick is going with his family to their first concert since the pandemic to see Lindsey Stirling.
[00:45:58] Vladimir’s pick is outdoor movie theaters.
[00:46:27] Sophia’s pick is discovering that a new smartphone case makes for a great draw organizer.
[00:47:06] Sean’s pick is going to two concerts in the Fall, Wilco & Sleater-Kinney in August and Alanis Morissette, Garbage, and Liz Phair in September.
[00:47:41] Likang’s pick is he discovered a better way to balance his sleep cycle.

Panelists:

Georg Link

Sophia Vargas

Sean Goggins

Guests:

Vladimir Filkov

Likang Yin

Sponsor:

SustainOSS

Links:

CHAOSS

CHAOSS Project Twitter