---
title: "How healthy is an open source project? Bus, pony and elephant factors on Sustain WP"
date: 2023-10-26
author: "Courtney Robertson"
featured_image: "https://courtneyr.dev/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/sustain-wp-project-health-chaoss-metrics-featured.jpg"
categories:
  - name: "Open Source"
    url: "/category/open-source.md"
  - name: "WordPress"
    url: "/category/wptips.md"
  - name: "Speaking"
    url: "/category/speaking.md"
---

# How healthy is an open source project? Bus, pony and elephant factors on Sustain WP

What happens to a project if one person gets hit by a bus? For Sustain WP, a limited podcast series on digital sustainability and WordPress, [Nahuai Badiola](https://profiles.wordpress.org/nahuai/)colleague interviewed me about project health. My answer borrowed three metrics from the CHAOSS community: the bus factor, the pony factor and the elephant factor.

## 🎙️ Episode details

- **Show:** Sustain WP, hosted by Nahuai Badiola
- **Topics:** project health metrics from CHAOSS, the dashboard proposal, and later episodes in the series
- **My role:** one of several guests; segments of my interview appear across the series
- **First released:** October 26, 2023, in episode 3, on the social pillar of sustainability
- **Listen and read along:** [Sustain WP episode 3, with a transcript](https://sustainwp.com/podcast/episode-3-introduction-to-the-social-pillar-of-sustainability/)

Audio of episode 3 from Sustain WP. [Read the episode 3 transcript on Sustain WP](https://sustainwp.com/podcast/episode-3-introduction-to-the-social-pillar-of-sustainability/).## 🚌 Three ways to measure project health

I’d attended Open Source Summit that May and found CHAOSS, a Linux Foundation community focused on open source health analytics. Three of its measures, in particular, seemed worth testing with WordPress teams.

- **Bus factor:** how much work or knowledge rides on one person. In other words, redundancy means someone can take a vacation without things stopping.
- **Pony factor:** how much depends on one contributor’s output. For example, Sergey merged nearly everything in core at the time. He’s excellent, and that’s exactly why it’s worth watching: a pony can quickly turn into a bus.
- **Elephant factor:** how much depends on one company. In WordPress, with love to my friends at Automattic, that company sponsors the bulk of contributors. Still, everyone wants more contributors from more places.

## 📊 Where the project health dashboard proposal came from

Next, Nahuai asked about the Make teams dashboard proposal. As a Training team rep, I’d told [Andrea Middleton](https://profiles.wordpress.org/andreamiddleton/)colleague about the overhead of running meetings, doing the work, hosting coffee hours and then trying to track everyone’s contributions by hand. In fact, every team had the same problem. The proposal aimed to automate what we can, so no contributor goes unrecognized, and to bring transparency to Five for the Future pledges.

## 🔁 Later episodes in the series

Later, Sustain WP reused parts of my interview in later episodes. [Episode 5](https://sustainwp.com/podcast/episode-5-wordpress-cms-how-can-we-make-it-more-sustainable/) (November 9, 2023) included my explanation of the WP Community Collective as a cofounder. A week later, [Episode 6](https://sustainwp.com/podcast/episode-6-wordpress-events-how-can-we-make-them-more-sustainable/) (November 16) included my point that eco friendly means different things across cultures, and reducing swag. [Episode 8](https://sustainwp.com/podcast/episode-8-the-journey-so-far/) (November 30) included my hope to fund many contributors.

## 🧪 What can you take for project health?

- **Team reps:** ask who on your team is a bus factor of one, and pair them with someone.
- **Companies:** diversifying sponsorship lowers a project’s elephant factor.

Also, more conversations like this one live in [my podcast and speaking archive](https://courtneyr.dev/category/speaking/).

## 🗓️ Archival note

Sustain WP first released my interview segments on October 26, 2023. Then I added this post on November 9, 2026, from the publisher’s episode notes and transcripts. Later episodes are summarized from their publisher notes. I reviewed the transcripts, not the audio.





[](https://courtneyr.dev/2023/10/26/sustain-wp-project-health-chaoss-metrics/)Courtney RobertsonHow healthy is an open source project? Bus, pony and elephant factors on Sustain WP