Community Health Through CHAOSS with Anita Ihuman

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the volunteer technologist podcast. Here, we take a look at the different ways that people who are technically inclined volunteer outside of their primary job. Today, I'm joined by Anita Ihuman. How are you doing

today? Fine. Thank you, Gene. Hello.

It's nice to meet you. Would you here. Would you, take a moment and introduce yourself to our listeners?

Oh, yeah. Sure. So hello, everyone. I am Anita Ihuman. I am a developer advocate at, a company called Metal Gear. And, on the side, I am also, doing a lot of things in open source from community management to building programs, to contributing to research efforts, and, so many other awesome stuff that I would love to share here today. That sounds pretty interesting.

So let's maybe start with the first one you mentioned with some of the open source community work that you're doing. What are you doing in that regards?

Yes. So, I am con currently on the CHAOSS, board of directors, and, I got there as a result of my contributions to the CHAOSS community and, in leading efforts around onboarding, documentation, helping other persons get involved, and, so many other areas like that. I also contribute to another open source community called Layer 5 as a community manager, where I also get people, settled in with the project and also navigate their way around the cloud native community.

So you mentioned the chaoss board of directors. Can you tell me what chaoss is? I'm not familiar with that.

It's a community that is focused on, developing metrics and, analytics around open source community health. Right? So the abbreviation itself stands for, Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software, and that's, like, the long form for chaoss. It's a project under the Linux Foundation, And so it has a bunch of other branches within the project, but its core purpose is developing metrics metrics models and, softwares that also supports, open source community health and standards.

So the chaoss project sounds like a pretty cool one. What kind of things are you actually doing with it?

Okay. So, within the chaoss community, I am part of the DEI working group where we develop metrics around, diversity, equity, and inclusion. And some other things that we do within the working group is, develop initiatives like the popular events budget initiatives that a lot of, open source events tend to have received badges for for their DEI efforts for the various events.

That's, that's very important work. I'm glad to hear that y'all are working on it and putting a real focus on it. You mentioned getting different badges. What does a project or work community have to do to get one of those badges?

Well, honestly, it just involve or revolves around how much, how intentional the project is about the inclusivity and then how much effort is put into achieving those intentions. And so we just bring our metrics to help us, give the community organizers or the community maintainers um, a picture so they can reflect on their efforts. Right? So our metrics are more of, like, a mural for them to look into and say, okay. This is how much we have done in terms of DEI,

use for or base basically signify. That's pretty cool. You mentioned doing some research with related to that. What kind of research do you do?

Right. So, sometime last year, we did, a research to help us understand the impact of these, metrics, these DEI metrics that we have developed because we have, like, over 200 metrics as as of now, and we weren't quite sure how impactful it was in real time, especially to the, persons that these metrics were developed for, which are individuals who identify with underrepresented groups.

Very cool. I'm guessing that that's leads into some of the community building stuff that you're talking about doing. What kind of community building and related things are you working with?

So, I mentioned earlier the Layer 5 community. So I have been part of that community for, like, quite some time, mostly because my open source, journey started from there. And so I, got involved in as one of those interested in contributing to the project.

What kind of what kind of things are you doing with regards to mentoring?

Alright. So, I think that's more on so on the side, yeah, on the side, I have I am a technical writer, and so I do a lot of writing from documentations to articles and so much more. And so, in terms of mentoring, I have worked with some some open source contributors to get them into contributing to the documentation aspect of projects, you know, how they can contribute, pointing them to areas that can improve on their general writing skills.

That sounds pretty cool. Can you enlighten me on in terms of what the Layer 5 project is? Or

Yeah. So, layer 5 is, a community, an open source community that develops cloud native solutions. And, one of its popular tool is probably Meshry, a cloud native management platform where you can, like, view a variety of cloud native tools, look at which one is more competitive for your software, and all of that. So they have offers, like, a bunch of solutions, basically focused towards cloud native technologies and all of that. And so that's what they do.

Gotcha. So what got you into doing all this different volunteer work around the organizing and all of the other stuff?

Well, at first, like, every person who is trying to upscale, it was the need to get hands on experience both from real time projects. Right? And, along the way, it became more of making impact and making a difference in these various communities. Like, in Layer 5, I got hung or hung on the idea that I can also get into the cloud native ecosystem.

That's really cool. How receptive have you found the different open source projects being to finding out that there are ways that they could improve or that someone is coming in and recommending some improvements to their the way they interact with their community?

From a personal experience, I think communities have been open to, you know, accept feedback. Have been open to change, mostly because these communities have already realized that there are existing problems that they need help with. And so, most of the ideas that I have brought up within these communities are, like, ideas that fix some of these existing challenges. And so I think they have been so receptive towards these topics that or suggestions that I bring up from my experience.

That's really good. I know that's not always the case. I've not personally experienced, but I've, you know, read various tech articles about communities that were not very open to change or not open to the feedback. And, of course, those communities, generally speaking, end up not surviving the long term. The people who are doing the work usually end up just going somewhere else. So

Well, yeah, those communities exist, but something that I got to learn as, during the course of that research study with CHAOSS is, most of these communities that are not very receptive to change often larger, communities that have have been built a long time ago. And these, topics of DEI were not as at the time.

With the older communities, have you you and the group started finding ways to show them the value and why they should care about it? Is that where some of the metrics come in?

Yes. Very correct. That's where some of the metrics come in and also discussing more on ways that research could come into play to showcase how how DEI in general can impact open source communities. I feel like, there are a lot of research studies that showcase disparities that exist within communities, inequalities that exist, but the very few of these, research studies capture, how much growth comes from open source communities that have accepted some of these topics. Right?

Oh, absolutely.

Right. So how much growth was there, and, how were they before this topic was introduced? So, like, having that fact readily available could help a lot of persons, you know, change their notion on these, you know, ideologies generally.

That kinda makes sense, especially in an open source community. A lot of times, it's very data driven, be it the data from the poor request or issues that are opened or the data from the track record of how things have been going. And with no data, it's just one person's opinion, you know, until proven otherwise a lot of times. So that makes a lot of sense. Right. So I have one other question for you. I noticed from our conversations before the recording that you're located in Nigeria.

Right. That that's an interesting question. And to be honest, at first, I I found this challenging. Like, the first one year to 2 year, I was still trying to figure out the time differences, how to communicate so it doesn't come off as offensive because, there's certain ways you would communicate to someone from Nigeria that a lot other persons will see as, oh, that is offensive.

for a call, and then you check the time, and it's, like, 2 AM my hour. And Yeah. That that does make for a little bit of an awkward conversation at 2 in the morning. Right.

And then I have to okay. Should I stay up till 2 AM, or I should just, you know, let it go and catch up? But I figured that having to bring up these differences made the concept of open source more open source. Because introducing that, okay, these things are different from my own point of view or from where I'm from. May some of these open source communities adjust to, you know,

the ideas you were talking about there because what kind of went through my head is it's making open source open to everyone, not just to the little area that it started out in, and that's a that's a very good thing. The diversity through a project makes for a much better outcome in general.

Right.

Cool. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today. I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me, Jean. This was an interesting conversation. I agree, but an enlightening one also. Right.

Before we go, I'd like to thank those of you who have boosted in support for the show. It is very much appreciated. This is a value for value podcast, which means I rely on listeners like yourself contributing back to fund it. As such, I'll never charge you to listen, but producing and hosting it does cost money.