DISQU Open Source Community Monitoring (OSCM)

Everyone is talking about digital sovereignty. Unfortunately, depending on who you ask, the definition varies wildly. Too often, organizations focus only on partial aspects of the concept, paving the way for "sovereign washing" rather than true independence.

While deploying Open Source software is a fundamental step toward digital sovereignty, merely using open code is not enough. The long-term stability and health of the underlying open-source communities are equally critical. If a crucial project is abandoned or governed by a single vulnerable entity, your sovereignty is weakened.

The DISQU OSCM (Open Source Community Metrics) standard was created to cut through the noise and provide a definitive way to evaluate the community stability of Open Source projects. It addresses community health holistically, breaking down all relevant aspects—such as commit activity, issue responsiveness, and change request dynamics—into concrete, measurable criteria to establish an objective baseline for long-term sustainability.

Repository Structure

The standard is organized into directories, with each directory representing a specific category or sub-area of digital sovereignty. Inside these directories, you will find individual Markdown files containing the specific criteria.

To ensure the standard remains highly readable for humans while still being parsable by machines, every criteria file strictly follows this internal layout:

1. YAML Header: Located at the very top, containing baseline metadata (criterion's ID and weight).
2. Title: A first-level heading (#) stating the exact name of the criterion.
3. Description: A second-level heading (##) followed by a human-readable explanation of the criterion's intent and context.
4. Evaluation Matrix: Another second-level heading (##) followed by a two-column table with header: The first column shows the scoring points from 0 to 5. The second column provides a human-readable explanation of the exact conditions that must be met to achieve that specific score.

How weighting works

To get the overall result of the OSCM, the weighted average of the results of all sub-areas. The weight value of each sub-area can be found in the YAML-header of the _index.lang.md as weight. Those weights are absolute numbers. To perform the weighted average calculation, the sum of all weights has to be calculated first by iterating over all sub-areas.

To get the result of a sub-area, the same weighted average calculation has to be performed for the criteria included in this sub-area. The weights of the criteria are stored in the YAML headers of each criterion .md file. Like for the sub-areas, those weights are absolute numbers. So you have to get the sum of all weights in this specific sub-area before the result of a sub-area can be calculated.

Contributing

The DISQU OSCM standard was authored and will be actively maintained by DISQU for the long term. However, true digital sovereignty thrives on transparency and community input. Thus, we have published this standard and highly encourage collaboration via Issues and Merge Requests.

If you would like to contribute, please note the following guidelines:

• Explain Your Reasoning: Every Merge Request must clearly outline the motivation for the change and the thought process behind it. This ensures that modifications remain comprehensible to everyone.
• Respect the Formatting: Strict adherence to the repository's folder and file structure, as well as the internal layout of the .md files described above, is mandatory.
• Vendor agnostic: The criteria should be independent on vendors.

Version

When this standard is used to quantify the community stability of Open Source projects, it is important to link to the version of the OSCM standard that was used to perform the calculation. Thus, the OSCM standard will be released in versions. Changes to the standard or new sub-areas and criteria are first tracked in separate branches of this repository. Several of these changes might be grouped together to a new version release. The master branch will always reflect the most recent version of the OSCM standard.

OSCM standard version	where to find in the git repository
1.0	current head on master

You don't want to calculate your projects?

We believe the criteria for digital sovereignty should be open and transparent. That is why the contents of this repository are openly available, allowing anyone to read and use them for internal self-assessments. But it is still a lot of work to collect all the needed information about projects to calculate the OSCM scoring based on it. If you don't want to do this on your own, we are happy to help you out with precalculated results. For more details, check out our website.

Prove your Sovereignty

Are you looking to have your product officially evaluated to gain a competitive edge? Or do you want to know exactly how sovereign your own organization's IT infrastructure truly is?

|We are here to help. Reach out to us, and we will conduct a comprehensive quantification. Upon successful completion, you will receive an official Certificate and Seal to publicly demonstrate your proven digital sovereignty. If desired, we also offer continuous monitoring of your setup, actively warning you should your sovereignty posture degrade over time. Get all the details on our website.