How many times have you built a taxonomy for open source software analysis? Whether you’re writing a survey for open source contributors or categorizing thousands of repositories, you’ve most likely had to create some kind of organizational structure to make sense of the data. Over the course of researching and analyzing open source projects, I’ve searched for and created many bespoke taxonomies to meet my analytical needs. In this talk, I’d like to share key learnings and pitfalls in my pursuit to answer “how do project characteristics influence behavior?”, as well as propose a solution for open source researchers to share and collaborate on open source taxonomies. No one should have build a new OSS taxonomy in a vacuum!