Panel Discussion: Measuring the Health of Open Source Projects in Public Health
summary
GitHub and WHO build a public project-health dashboard that queries the GitHub API, generates a JSON file via a GitHub Action, and serves a static Next.js site on GitHub Pages. backend shifts from Go to Node.js/TypeScript for faster onboarding; metrics include collaborators, licenses, forks, open PRs/issues (no time series without a database). CHAOSS guidance informs metric selection. Practical surprises: many WHO repos lack licenses and most community contributions clustered during the COVID peak.
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chapters (18)
- 0:00Open Source health dashboard intro
- 5:49Dashboard demo
- 9:23Dashboard strategy and tech
- 11:55Project obstacles faced
- 14:50Selecting health metrics
- 16:39WHO's OS collaboration goals
- 19:26Open sector project work
- 21:39Digital public goods metrics
- 24:47Open Source in public health
- 26:56Future features and community
- 32:01Tool evolution to independent OS
- 33:06Global collaboration efforts
- 34:13Summarizing data context
- 36:02Adapting dashboard for others
- 37:50Data analysis methods
- 38:35WHO vs external projects
- 39:18Surprises and lessons learned
- 41:28Closing remarks and contributions
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