Sustainability Auditing Tool (SAT)
A web-based auditing platform for evaluating the long-term sustainability and community health of open-source projects.
Overview
The Sustainability Auditing Tool (SAT) is a web-based platform for auditing open-source projects against indicators of long-term sustainability — covering contributor activity, governance, community health, and project maintenance practices. SAT was developed as a working prototype to translate the agent-based and cybernetic research findings of the Open-source Sustainability working group into a practical assessment instrument that maintainers, funders, and researchers can use to evaluate a project’s trajectory.
Origin
SAT originated as a capstone project at the University at Albany, SUNY, through a partnership brokered between SUNY Albany and the Orthogonal Research and Education Laboratory (OREL). The capstone was completed by Brian McCorkle and his team, with Jesse Parent serving as the OREL-side advisor on the project. The partnership exemplifies how academic capstone coursework can feed directly into ongoing research-group initiatives — in this case, the broader Open-source Sustainability initiative at OREL.
Team
- Brian McCorkle — Lead, Capstone Team (University at Albany, SUNY; OREL)
- Brianna Adams — Capstone Team (University at Albany, SUNY)
- Chris Edwards — Capstone Team (University at Albany, SUNY)
- Jesse Parent — Advisor (OREL; JOPRO)
- Bradly Alicea — Senior Advisor (OREL)
Repository & Site
- Source: github.com/SAT-7/sat
- Live tool: sustainabilityauditingtool.com
Associated Working Groups & Programs
Joint Open Source Summer Cohort
A collaborative summer cohort across OREL, DevoWorm, and JOPRO — open-source contribution, instruction, and professional development, anchored by Google Summer of Code.
ProgramOpen-source Sustainability
A multi-year initiative investigating the long-term health and sustainability of open-source communities through agent-based modeling, active inference, and cybernetic approaches.