Outline testable criteria that could replace self-declared status

[themightychris]

A common theme with project indexes that track the maturity/status of a project is that it is a struggle to keep up to date. Generally these values get set once and never updated. Maturity/status is a critical metric for network project discovery, but asking project maintainers to keep self-reported data seems to be a dead-end.

What if instead we could define one or more health scales that were based on material and evaluation criteria container right inside the project readme.

For example:

• Define production health tests in a repository
• Presence and content of ROADMAP file
• Presence and content of STORIES file
• Define test command
• Define a production URL that reports usage metrics
• Define a production URL that reports date data