Summary
Evaluate whether GrimoireLab is a useful metrics tool for LibreCorps to set up for managing current / future contracts
Background
Grimoire is a visual dashboard presenting open source community/people metrics. It integrates with existing open source tools and platforms to give an approximation of changes in an open source project. It includes monitoring areas like source code, issue/task management, mailing lists/forums, documentation, continuous integration (CI), and more.
This could be a useful service for LibreCorps to provide. If we set up Grimoire, we could create visual dashboards for each team and/or cohort. The dashboards would include graphs and charts for pieces of what we already evaluate on with our rubrics. We could provide links to the dashboards both for individual teams/cohorts and also the UNICEF fund managers to periodically check-in and quickly see the state of a team's open source engagement.
It also gives us a more helpful and intuitive way to monitor progress by an individual team in small, gradual steps versus a team that is not engaging with our resources at all.
Details
@Nolski and I didn't yet come to an agreement on what this looks like or how it should be presented, so we decided to start with an experiment and see where it goes. Steps to bring a proof-of-concept experiment might look like the following:
- Spin up new DigitalOcean droplet under FOSS@MAGIC account
- Install Grimoire onto droplet
- Choose one team (preferably one doing well) to build a mock dashboard for, try out different data collection plugins to see what is useful or not
- Tweak internally based on feedback
- If we like it, present to UNICEF and get their feedback
Outcome
- Us:
- Easier to track small gains / community changes in a team's project
- Helps us work across multiple repos / platforms (i.e. for example, easy to combine two GitHub repos and a GitLab repo)
- Monitor cohort progress in a convenient-to-use web interface (i.e. easier for us to on-board new students / people to help with LibreCorps program)
- Helps make LibreCorps work more indispensable to evaluating success of an open source project
- Clients:
- Move towards producing meaningful quantifiable metrics (these will get produced with or without us, do we want to influence these for the better?)
- At-a-glance picture of how a project, team, or cohort is doing
- Potential to reuse and repeat across future clients
cc: @itprofjacobs