CHAOSS OSPO WG, Jan 22, 2026  🔗 **Source:** [CHAOSS OSPO WG, Jan 22, 2026](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir1RdiflB-o) Let's start the meeting. Okay. So, welcome everyone to the January 22nd edition of the Chaos OSPO working group meeting. As always, we are under the chaos code of conduct. So, keep that in mind and please be kind to each other. We have uh a couple of things on the agenda. Feel free to add some other items if you if there's anything else you want to discuss. Uh the two things two things that we have we have an update from the CMS OSPO. So Natalyia will be showing off their some of their new tools which is uh should be interesting. I'm looking forward to that. And then uh we'll have just a brief conversation about uh Fostam, see who's going to be there and uh yeah. So um Natalyia, are you ready? Do you wanna? >> Yes. I'm gonna take over and share. Yeah. >> Perfect. Okay. All right. Cool. Can you guys see my screen? Oh, I have so many windows. >> Okay, >> cool. >> Yes. >> Um, let's see. Okay. So, just wanted to share a little um dev update that the CMS OSO was working on over the holidays. So, this is a little bit old news, but we haven't had the opportunity opportunity to share it with um the working group. So um this website over here is our ospo guide. Um this is where our this is kind of like the main hub where we um publish guidance on how we do open source in the agency and these guides are all authored by um the CMS open source program office team. Also I realized I didn't introduce myself. Hi everyone, I'm Natalia. I'm a software engineer working in the open source program office at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Um yes, and this is our OSO guide. Um so one thing one new thing we shipped um that we're super proud of is our new tools page. Um, so our GitHub organization has I think about 70 repos and so we wanted to include a tools page on the OSPO guide website to highlight um kind of our crown jewel tools that um other people can um have the opportunity to use. And um what's cool about this is that this tools page I'm going to send the link in the chat is not um it's actually not a manual. >> Thanks. Thanks Romy. Um this is actually a list that it's not manually updated. Um we actually automated um kind of populating this list over here through um using our repository metadata. Um so one of the initiatives that we've been working at the agency is as part of our um software inventory efforts, we've been um shipping a code.json JSON file to all of our repositories. And in our code.json file is metadata all about the repository. So we have data such as name, description, um usage type, if it's open source or inner source, um repository URL. So kind of information that helps um that describes the repository. And um we've and this is part of our efforts to um implement the share it act where um one of the requirements is that we have to publish a index with all of the metadata on our repositories. So um that's why we have um decided to store all of our metadata into this code.json file which every repository has. And so the way that we um automatically populated this page is that we pulled the code.json files across all 70 repositories in our GitHub organization. And then now that we have metadata on all the tools, we filtered the tools by I believe it was status. So whether the tools are in production or I believe if they are they have a release um this status field is a field that is on public code YL. So the options over there is what we used and um we filtered by production and I believe we also filtered by where is it featured in our tags um array. Yeah. And then so uh it goes through all 70 of our repos and then it was able to identify tools that fall under that criteria. And these are our list of tools here that we now showcase in our website. Um yeah and that's pretty much it unless anyone else in the team has anything to add. Okay, cool. That's it for me to Don. Thank you. That's super cool. I I really like seeing how how your team has has automated so many of the things and really really utilizing those uh those uh code was it JSON files. Um I think that's I think that's great. I Yeah, I love that. >> Thank you. Yeah. And we also um because we're going through this metadata um this effort to inventory the repositories and adding metadata to the repositories, we're exploring ways this year on how we can provide how we can use the metadata to provide value and I guess storytelling about our repositories. Yeah. So that will be coming up in a future update work in progress. >> Yeah, that's great. Cool. Well, thank you so much for sharing sharing with us. I really appreciate it. Um, any any final questions for for the team? Okay, cool. Um, I did want to just have a quick uh quick check in to see uh who's going to be at at Fosm. I'll be at FOSM. Uh, anybody? >> You're there. >> David will be there. Alan will be there. I I saw a note from from Ria in the chat that maybe maybe when she's an empty neester, she can go to PASDM. >> I'm hoping. >> I I would love to just be able to have a job that let me go to conferences. That would be fun. >> Yeah, for sure. Uh it does it does get a little a little tiring though, I gotta say, as someone who's Yeah. had jobs that were a lot of that. Um, cool. So, what are people looking forward to? Um, I mean, on on my side, well, obviously Chaos Con, um, we have we have Chaos Con on on Thursday. Um, for those of you who aren't going to be there at the social, I've 3D printed a whole bunch of different Chaos things. So, we can make earrings, keychains. Um, I'll have to I'll have to import this to the North America Chaos as well so that we can we can do the same thing because I feel like the those of you who only go to the North American ones are missing out on the on the cool stuff. >> I love the earrings. They're really nice. >> Yeah. Well, these are new ones, too. I've got little little chaotic earrings now. Oh, it's kind of >> I have the I have the colorful ones. The other one the circle ones. >> Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna print some of those, too. Now they now instead of just coming in one size come in four sizes. So we have we have big ones, little ones. Uh it should be should be fun. Um so other than Chaos Con obviously, uh I I'm really looking forward to the bunding dev room which is on Saturday. So I'm looking forward to that one because there are loads of good talks in that room and I think that's going to be really interesting. Um, and then I'm also looking forward to the community dev room because they do a really nice job of getting getting good talks in that dev room as well. So, those are the those are the two things that I'm interested in for for Fosdom. I don't know the others. I don't know, David, if you had any anything in particular that you're looking forward to at Fosdom. Just hanging out with people, that's good, too. Hallway Track, totally legit. when I have gone in the past, the legal dev room is one of the most sophisticated and interesting uh legal community rooms I've ever been to at an open source conference. It is always a banger, so to speak, Fosdom. So, uh if people can do that, I would highly recommend it. If you're any kind of wonky or nerdy or policy uh shaped type person, it is a good one. >> Yeah, I've heard nothing but good things about that that Devra as well. Um I personally tend to avoid things that look like licensing and compliance because that's just not my jam. Um I'm happy to have other people do that. So I I've never been, but it's it's run by really great people and I've heard Yeah, I've heard nothing but good things about it. How about you, Alan? What are you interested in at Fazdam? >> I will uh represent the to-do group at our booth as a to-do ambassador. I will also represent the uh Apache NATOX project that the Apache foundation boot and u I'm mostly interested in the asbond track uh this event and the hallway track since it's an awesome event and you can meet so many people if you pre-book your meeting. Yeah, it's it's really hard to find people at Fosdom because there are so many people and it's um it's a little little chaotic and not in the chaos way either way, >> but it's good. It's a good chaos. >> Yeah, it's a really good event. >> Yeah, for sure. >> Okay, cool. Um and then we have one other thing that uh is on the agenda, so I don't know who put that there if somebody wants to talk about it. Yeah, there's um I think the CFP just closed unfortunately, so the timing is not great, but uh George Washington University is doing their annual open source conference. It's their second one. It's going to be March 23rd and 24th here in Washington DC at GWU. Um it definitely had uh plenty of folks who were, you know, OSPO related. It's put on by the GW OSO. So uh if you are on the east coast or will be in Washington DC in you know late March uh this could be a good opportunity uh to go and meet and see some of the folks in the OSPO community and just generally open source as well. I think my favorite part last year was uh they had this public sauce which was like this open source art exhibit that they put at a gallery and they showed off a ton of open hardware and just like sensors and art that was made using uh machines and computers and code and uh most of the projects had a git repo associated with them. Uh there's just like a very cool multid-disiplinary kind of a vibe there and uh they had design students uh work with a class to build out the stickers for the conference and they use generative AI with the designers as well. So there's just like this very interesting integrated approach that isn't just about um repos and code and you know engineering. Uh, I thought that it was very well represented across the disciplines when I was there last year and I'm really excited to see what what kind of comes up this year. So, if you like nerdy stuff that isn't just code and open source, I would definitely recommend OSCON and GW. >> Awesome. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, the folks that organize it are are big friends of Chaos. So, like David David Libert I think is is involved. Uh, so yeah. So I'm sure it's I sure sure it's going to be a great event. >> Okay. >> One of the speakers one of the speakers is going to be Frank Nagel who was the the fellow who published the Harvard Business uh review article about how it would cost $8 trillion to rewrite all the open source code that we have. So I think that keynote is going to be very interesting uh if nothing else. >> Yeah. Cool. Remy, do you know if there's a virtual option for that conference? I I'd like to see the note at least. >> I wouldn't be surprised. I believe last year there was a virtual option, but if you ping David Liippard um or try registering for the conference maybe um they might have answers, >> but yeah, I'm lucky I'm here in DC so I'm going to be there in person, but we'd love for remote participation for the rest of the team in the OSO here. Okay, cool. Um, yes indeed, the call for proposals is now open for the open source summit in May in Minnesota. Um, the CFP closes February 8th, so it closes very very soon. We also we usually do a Chaos Con there. I need to check in with folks to see if we're planning on organizing that again. Um, I assume we probably will. They're usually pretty generous giving us giving us a room, but I don't know that we've requested it yet. So, that might be something we need to get on. Um, yeah. And then, uh, as I mentioned, Chaos Con is, uh, a week from today, as a matter of fact. All right. Uh, anything else anybody wants to chat about today? I think an interesting topic that we won't necessarily get into today or at least I'm going to have to drop in 10 minutes unfortunately so for another meeting so I can't get into it today but I don't know that we've ever addressed use of AI in terms of assessing any of the things that we're concerned about and there's a lot of focus on AI and I've noticed that some of the scanning ing tools have started promoting use of AI within their scanning tools. And I don't know if I'm excited, nervous, or terrified by that. Yeah, there is there is actually a group within chaos that just started and I was just gonna um see if I could find it. It's like AI alignment or something. Um Oh, sorry. I have to I'm failing to internet right now. There we go. Uh AI Yeah, there's a working group for AI alignment that um uh Emma Irwin has been helping to spearhead along with I think Sean Gogggins has been involved as well. Um so they're kind of let me see if there's a quick description here. Uh no. Um but yeah, but they they are looking at kind of the alignment around around AI and chaos metrics and um related related topics. So that might be that might be a meeting that you might want to drop in drop in on. And there is a of course a Slack channel for it. WGAI WG-I-Lignment which I can put in the notes. There are a lot of moving parts with AI just OSI was trying to come up with the AI definition. Then I recently read the model openness framework from the Linux Foundation which I thought was really interesting. I mean it was it kind of it's a good read if you haven't read it. I and I say that I mean it's it's a somewhat dry paper but I kind of found it fascinating. So uh definitely recommend that to anyone who hasn't taken a look. It's complex but that's focused more on AI for the sake of AI itself and transparency in AI. I haven't really thought much about AI as applied to a use case for solving the problems that we solve in OSOS. Yeah, it's an it's an interesting topic. Um, it's one I I will admit I don't know much about. I'm um I'm one of those people who's just so tired of hearing about AI that I'm um I'm I'm unlikely to participate in a conversation about AI. It's just not my I'm just so tired of it. I'm just so over it. And that's just my own being old and jaded. I guess there's nothing wrong with it. Like I I'm I'm happy to, you know, other people other people talk about it. Um >> buzz word of the day for sure or it's been the buzzword of the last two years. So yes, I can definitely understand the fatigue. I feel like if I don't figure it out though, then someone's going to just shove it on me. So I have to figure out how I want to own this myself. Yeah. Um, so we could add it. We could add it as a future agenda item. Is that something that you would want to lead the discussion? Would we need to find someone else to lead it? >> Oh, I definitely don't want to lead that. I don't think I'm educated enough in this space to be a speaker. Maybe pull in. Was it Sean or Emma? >> Probably Emma because Emma's got the OSO context um since she worked in Microsoft's OSPO for years. >> That would be cool to get her perspective and maybe cross-pollinate the groups a little bit. >> Yeah. Okay, that would be that would be useful. So, I will I will talk to Emma about that. Um we also have a couple of other future agenda items. So, there's a group within the to-do group. um that's called uh it's a it's a working group OSPO no sorry OSS and business so they're they're looking at at metrics that are focused more on more on business so kind of commercial open source that that sort of thing um and they've proposed a couple of agenda topics kind of in that in that vein they are having their first meeting of the year on Friday so um I contacted them and asked them if they wanted to come speak in this meeting they were like No, not yet. Um, so we'll likely get uh them coming in for a topic or two in the next next month or so. Um, anything else we want to add to the future agenda items list of the topics people want to talk about. >> Remy, >> we over in uh CMS OSO it's a little too early to say but we saw the practitioners guide around archiving repositories and have been >> kind of going a little bit uh very excited. We've been very excited about it and we've been building some things and experimenting with some things. So there may be a presentation in the future >> about uh >> archival succession planning and sun seting which is uh we're hoping to demo some of the tools and then contribute back to the chaos uh practitioner guide uh when we've got some more to share. Uh if you're an enterprising individual and you want to see the release early, release often sausage making process, uh the name of the repository is called repo sunset. Uh but sorry, Nat, I know we're blowing up the spot a little bit early, but uh be future topic. Future topic. >> Yeah. Yeah, and I would I would love to have you contribute some stuff back to the um to the sun setting guide because you know most of that is based on what Stepppka and I mostly steppp did at VMware. Um so it'd be great to have that additional perspective of what's worked in and other organizations especially an organization as as different from VMware as as CMS. So it's nice to have that breadth. Um so I'll just make a note of that. Awesome. Yeah, that'll be great. Cool. All right. Anything else? We already covered the reminders. Um, anything else anyone wants to talk about? Cool. All right. Uh, oh, one more one more thing. I am actually I'm going to be at an event in Ireland for this next meeting which is on the 5th of February. Um does so we could do we could do two things. We could we could cancel the 5th of February. Um, or if somebody wanted to volunteer to facilitate, I can make sure that we have someone to click the record button if somebody wants to facilitate and drive the agenda for that meeting if we have any volunteers because I would I would love to have a volunteer to do it so that we don't have to just cancel it. >> I'm happy to volunteer if there's an agenda. >> Okay. So, that means uh All right. >> Let me double check. Actually, let me double check and make sure I'm not already blocked that day. So, that's a real concern. Uh >> yeah, it's the the fifth. >> You said it was the fifth. >> Yeah. >> Uh yeah, I think I can do that. I have another meeting right before that goes right up to it, but I should be able to duck out of that. Okay. So, I'm just going to put this at the top of the top of the agenda. Um, RIA facilitate February 5th. >> If Ria doesn't make it, I can take it. >> Okay, cool. >> I love having a backup. >> Okay, so we've got a facilitator and a backup facilitator. I'll find someone to record and I will also I'll see if Emma is interested in coming and talking about uh AI because that would be a really interesting topic. >> And then you get to avoid it then. >> And I get to avoid it. Let's see. You saw where I was going with that one. >> I I'm curious. I really am curious though because I think there's a play for chaos here. I mean, a lot of the focus has been on >> AI just as using it and the accuracy and open models versus closed models. I've seen a lot on that. And then there's been some focus on AI bombs and what do you have to report to provide transparency, but what I have not seen that I think intersects with chaos really well is how do you determine the health of the model? Is it a biased model? Is it a model that provides grossly inaccurate data? Is it a model that it was only trained on x number of parameters and therefore tends to hallucinate a lot? I I think those are really interesting questions and ones that I haven't seen any scholarship around yet, >> although maybe there is and I'm just not looking in the right places. >> Yeah, I don't know. They're good questions for sure and stuff that we need to think about. >> All right. Sorry, but I have to run. So, see you all in two weeks except Don >> except me. All right. Well, I think we're I think we've wrapped everything up. So, so thank you everybody for for coming today. I'll see a few of you at FOSM and uh the rest of you all catch at a meeting at some future time. >> See you. Thanks everybody. Bye. Bye. Bye., CHAOSS OSPO WG, Jan 22, 2026, YouTube, 01kp8j5z8p2xj9fchqnvbsg0yy.