The “What’s Next for Open Source” Workshop
On July 11, 2024 in New York City, a group of open source enthusiasts and strategists got together to workshop the question: How can we better demonstrate the value of working in the open and prove the benefit of resourcing open source projects?
Why it matters: This was a timely question because the previous two days was the OSPOs For Good conference at the United Nations. Many attendees wanted to take the conversation to the next level and put open source into practice. To get the funding, political support, and to overall move the needle, working in the open needs to serve a purpose and that needs to be communicated.
Who’s behind it: The workshop was led by Bitergia’s Open Source Strategist, Georg Link, along with Stephanie Lieggi, Executive Director at UCSC OSPO and CROSS, UC Santa Cruz. They guided the group through a series of collaborative and metrics-based discussions.
Georg's Key Takeaways
- Governments care about open source: This workshop was held the day after the United Nations’s OSPOs for Good event, so a theme throughout was how to drive value for OSPOs across governments, agencies, non-profits, universities, and industry. We heard many times how open source software is already important in these organizations. The challenge now is how to manage and support OSS long-term. Continuing to invest in open source and growing the engagement requires effective metrics to show the impact of what is already being done.
- Metrics to drive investments: Metrics will be important to guide open source investment decisions. When open source efforts in governments and agencies are championed by a leader who uses only their realm of influence to drive those efforts, whoever succeeds that leader can stop the efforts. A big push now is to anchor open source efforts in laws and regulations that will outlive individual leaders. To get the support for this and also to ensure the long-term success of open source, metrics to show the impact will be critical.
- Use GQM to find effective metrics: It’s important to evaluate the unique OSPO challenges for your unique organization. A Goal-Question-Metrics (GQM) approach can help do this. Here are the steps:
- Goals: Identify and understand your organizational goals.
- These can vary significantly but typically include objectives like recruiting talent or enhancing community engagement.
- Questions: Break down these goals into specific, actionable questions.
- For example, to assess recruitment efforts, one might ask, “Who are important contributors?” or “How many did we help hire?”
- Metrics: Develop metrics to answer these questions.
- Metrics should be operational and data-driven, such as the number of contributions by name, hiring successes, or project activity levels. Keep in mind that some good data points, like the number of commits, may not be relevant to the question you need to answer.
- Goals: Identify and understand your organizational goals.
- Experience with metrics: There’s a lot to learn from others’ journeys. Participants at the event shared their own initiatives and challenges that others can learn from.
- Process-driven sustainability metrics: Vladimir Filkov from UC Davis and Charlie Schweik from UMass Amherst, for example, highlighted the importance of process-driven sustainability metrics. Their approach involved comprehensive metrics and analytics using AI, and they linked the metrics to governance and policy actions.
- Ecosystem metrics: Arun Gupta from Intel also shared. He spoke about the benefits of open source foundations like the Linux Foundation, CNCF, Eclipse Foundation, and Apache Foundation. Metrics for evaluating these foundations included project counts, contributor numbers, code contributions, and financial investments.
- Localized metrics: Many others from Sophia Vargas from Google’s OSPO to Cynthia Lo from GitHub to Wilfred Pinfold from OpenCommons all shared informative and useful case studies for demonstrating the value of working in the open. Each used different metrics because the stakeholders wanted to see different outcomes from the open collaboration.
Go Deeper
Participants left the event with new insights along with advice from others who had already risen to the challenge of demonstrating the value of working in the open.
Read the CHAOSS blog post by Venu Vardhan Reddy Tekula and Georg Link to go deeper into the key takeaways.
This blog post was written by Julia Lawson and Georg Link and is based on the CHAOSS blog post linked to above.
