CHAOSSMonthly - May 2025

[ElizabethN]

CHAOSSMonthly Newsletter - May 2025

👇 In this Issue

• We've Moved CHAOSSMonthly to GitHub
• CHAOSScon is happening June 26, 2025
• New Working Group for CHAOSS Education
• CHAOTIC of the Month: Cali Dolfi
• Community Reminders

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📰 We've Moved CHAOSSMonthly to GitHub

In order to make our newsletters more transparent, accessible, and easy to publish, we are trying an experiment by moving them to GitHub. We'd appreciate your feedback on how well this works! We have an issue dedicated to this topic, so feel free to leave your comments there.

If you'd like to subscribe to the CHAOSSmonthly newsletter, you can do so through an RSS feed reader.

The URL to subscribe is https://github.com/chaoss/community/discussions/categories/newsletters.atom

Examples of some feed readers that have been tested with Open RSS are:

• RSS Feed Reader (Feeder) - Google Chrome Extension
• Feedly
• Newsblur

If you have other suggestions, feel free to drop them in the pinned Newsletter discussion about RSS Feeds!

📆 CHAOSScon Happening June 26, 2025

In case you missed it, our CHAOSScon NA event is happening on June 26, 2025 in Denver, Colorado. This event is an add-on to Open Source Summit North America, so a registration to that event is required. You can read more about CHAOSScon on our website.

The schedule will be posted soon, so stay tuned!
You can also help out at the CHAOSS Booth if you'd like! No experience needed, and you can sign up for as little as an hour's worth of time. To learn more, join the #ossna-booth-duty Slack channel.

📰 New Working Group: CHAOSS Education

The Education Team has officially expanded into a Working Group! This team works on the collection of resources and videos designed to ease a person's journey into open source and CHAOSS. These videos are 5-10 minutes and cover a variety of topics, including Open Source 101 and all about CHAOSS Practitioner Guides.

You can read more about the Education Project on the website, and you can join the Education Working Group every other Wednesday at 9:00 am US Central/Chicago time. The next meeting is May 28 and you can subscribe to the Education Working Group calendar by subscribing to this URL: https://ics.teamup.com/feed/ksk9vit7vig1w48j3s/14322824.ics

❤️ CHAOTIC of the Month - Cali Dolfi!

A little about Cali:
Hi y'all, I'm Cali and I live in the Boston area, Massachusetts, US. I grew up on the gulf coast of Texas and moved up to Boston almost 8 years ago to play softball at Boston University, and made this wonderful place my home. At my core, I am on a constant pursuit to understand myself and others more. I'm always curious to know more about people's backgrounds, interests, and perspectives that make them, them. It seems almost poetic that I stumbled into analyzing internet communities as a career.
My brain is wired a little different (AuDHD, BPDII, APD), and while that brings on its own hurtles, I also believe it can be a superpower. As Debbie Reynolds said in one of my favorite childhood movies Halloweentown, "being normal is vastly overrated."
I'm passionate about paving and supporting new paths for people to come into the technology space. Many people do not have the resources or exposure to coding in their early years and that should not be a barrier to a career. As a queer women coming from a fishing community of a few hundred people, I hope to be a lighthouse for others to find success and fulfillment in a industry that can feel intimidating, inaccessible, and unattainable.
Almost 5 years ago, I started my internship in Red Hat's OPSO as a Data Scientist. I had no open source background, had not taken a data science course yet, and had very minimal coding experience. I was given the time to stumble and learn as I went on to create what is now Project Aspen/8Knot and help Red Hat make informed decisions around the open source communities. I believe that as a data scientist its best to be as close to what you are analyzing as possible, and being a Senior Data Scientist in Red Hat's OSPO fits that perfectly. I will forever be grateful for the opportunity Red Hat gave me to grow into that.
Im a strong advocate of having work/life balance (while unsuccessful myself at times). Aside from my work, I love being active and outdoors. I spend about half my year traveling around mostly the western US skiing. During the off season, road biking, volleyball, paddle boarding and hiking takes up most of my time. When indoors, I love cooking and watching social strategy games like Big Brother and Survivor.
What Cali works on at CHAOSS:
The two main working groups I am involved in are the Augur/8Knot WG and the Data Science WG. I like to jokingly refer to myself as Augur's super user. I manage a large Augur instance in Red Hat's OSPO, with that I discover and diagnose different issues and hope to also be a part of their solution. I have become a code contributor here and there and have helped push forward the project to be able to run using Docker. As a data scientist by trade, I hope to be able to return to those roots in the DS WG in the coming months. I'm greatly looking forward to being able to focus more on data analysis again.
I have popped up on my fair share of CHAOSScasts and have become increasingly involved with planning CHAOSSCONs. If you see me at OSSNA, come say hi!
Cali's advice to newcomers:
It can be a bit overwhelming to look at the whole CHAOSS community and figure out where to get involved. This would be my recommended path for a newcomer:
Research a bit into the different working groups, look into their repos and maybe attend a meeting or two for a few different ones.
From there, I recommend focusing on a single group that sparks your interest and that you can consistently attend the meetings.
Within the working group, find something you are passionate about and dive in and make it your own. If people see the effort you put in, they will be drawn to supporting you in that endeavor.
When it comes to open source as a whole, my answer is actually not much different. Find what you are actually interested in and what will allow you to develop the skills you are looking for, whether that be for your career or passion. One opportunity can change your entire career trajectory, and getting involved in a community can put you in a great position to get that opportunity.
Also, do not be discouraged if you find that the first project or so that you get involved in is not a good fit or does not interest you once you get a barring of what that work actually is. Learning what you don't like is as important as learning what you do.

👯 Community Reminders

Add your Community Contributions via an Issue on GitHub

We now have an easier way to add your community contribution to our community-contributions.md document. Simply open an issue using the CHAOSS Contribution Issue Template, and when you submit your issue, your contribution will be added.

Looking for Podcast Questions and Ideas for CHAOSScast

Alice Sowerby, Harmony Elendu, and the CHAOSScast team would love to hear your questions, comments, and ideas for new episodes of CHAOSScast! Feel free to send an email to podcast@chaoss.community with your thoughts.

CHAOTIC of the Month Nomination Form

Have you noticed a fellow CHAOTIC doing something amazing for CHAOSS? Has there been someone who is going above and beyond? If you'd like to nominate them for CHAOTIC of the Month, now you can! With our CHAOTIC of the Month feature, we like to celebrate their contributions to CHAOSS and enable our whole community to get to know them a little better. It's a great way to show appreciation for our fellow CHAOTICs so don't hesitate to nominate someone through our CHAOTIC of the Month Nomination Form.

Upcoming Meetings

Please refer to the CHAOSS Community Calendar for details on all upcoming meetings. Meetings should show in your local timezone, but you can convert to another time zone here. You can also subscribe to individual meetings on the CHAOSS Community Calendar by right-clicking the .ics file and adding to your calendar as a URL.