What words do folks use in their OSPO to describe inbound and outbound activities / metrics?

[anajsana]

This discussion thread is mirrored from the TODO Slack Channel and is anonymized

I'm trying to find a relatively simple way to point people to the CHAOSS metrics that they might use depending on the type of thing that they are focused on. At the very top level, I'm thinking about 2 buckets:

• Outbound: Activities related to open source projects and communities themselves, including project health, upstream, and contribution.
• Inbound: Activities related to the things you need to think about when incorporating open source into your products, services, or infrastructure, including project viability and compliance measures.

At ORGANIZATION XYZ, we broke these down into inbound and outbound (also called upstream). Is this a useful classification? What words do you use in your OSPO to describe these 2 types of activities?

[anajsana]

anonymous person answered:

Those are good classifications although we use slightly different terms: most outbound (i.e., where we are distributing) is "downstream" and contributions are separately categorized as "upstream".

[anajsana]

anonymous person answered:

I also use inbound (procurement and compliancy) and outbound (development culture and cooperation) as the global classification for our actions.

[anajsana]

anonymous person answered:

I find upstream/downstream a little murky, because both terms can apply to a given situation: you're downstream of your upstream and upstream of your downstream, so when one of those words is used, which do you mean? Just me, I guess

[anajsana]

anonymous person answered:

so if you are looking at the metrics only through the eyes of the maintainers than it might make sense, but if you add personas into the mix like a business assessing risk they might not feel like they were "inbound".

people may use chaoss metrics differently. not all are maintaining a project for others to consume. some may use a subset of metrics to evaluate the viability of a project for use in their products. so the audience will matter on some level