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OSPO Archives - CHAOSS

Aug 21 2024
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Defining and Measuring the Value of Working in the Open: Key Takeaways from the workshop at “What’s Next for Open Source?”

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On July 11, 2024 in New York City, open source enthusiasts and strategists gathered for an insightful workshop led by two CHAOTICS: Georg Link, Open Source Strategist at Bitergia, and Stephanie Lieggi, Executive Director at UCSC OSPO and CROSS, UC Santa Cruz. This event was held the day after the United Nations’s OSPOs for Good event, so a theme throughout the workshop was how to drive value for OSPOs across governments, agencies, non-profits, universities, and industry. The event focused on addressing a common challenge of OSPOs: demonstrating the value of working in the open and justifying resources for open source projects. Here are the key themes, topic points, and takeaways from the workshop.

Introduction: The Value of Working in the Open

The workshop opened with a compelling question: Have you ever struggled to show the value of working in the open? This question set the stage for exploring effective strategies to justify resources for open source initiatives. Georg introduced the Goal-Question-Metrics (GQM) approach, which is a recommended approach from the CHAOSS project. Because the workshop revolved around the GQM approach, we will explain it here.

The Goal Question Metric (GQM) Approach

At CHAOSS, we have advocated for using the GQM because it is a structured method for deriving metrics that align with organizational goals. It involves three key steps:

  1. Goals: Identify and understand your organizational goals. These can vary significantly but typically include objectives like recruiting talent or enhancing community engagement.
  2. 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?”
  3. 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. Some good data points, like the number of commits, may not be relevant to the question you need to answer.

Selecting the right metrics is crucial. They should align with organizational goals and also be mindful of data sources and potential unintended consequences. 

After identifying the most effective metrics, tell a story with them to highlight how your OSPO contributed to the success of the organization.

Sharing Organizational Goals

In an interactive discussion, workshop participants shared diverse organizational goals, emphasizing the importance of aligning open source efforts with the broader mission statements of their organizations. We collected some bullet points on a screen and participants discussed many of them.

The most common goals included:

  • Being a thought leader: Working in the open to demonstrate the skill and knowledge of the organization to lead conversations.
  • Helping the community: Giving back to the community by working transparently and in the open.
  • Diversity: Including many voices, especially those who would not get a seat at the table if it weren’t for working in the open.
  • Tech literacy: Upskilling employees by allowing them to work in the open on new technologies.
  • Civic utility: Working in the open can bridge the gap between the government agency or organization and the constituents who are being served.
  • Interoperability:Working in the open allows for alignment of technological advances within the organization and in the larger open source community.

Case Studies

Finding ways to demonstrate the value of working in the open is not a new challenge, although the creation of new OSPOs is now elevating the stakes in sustaining these efforts.  To speed up the process of finding meaningful metrics and stories, the workshop participants were introduced to people who could share their past experiences.

CHAOSS Project: Community Health Analytics

Sophia Vargas from Google’s OSPO presented the CHAOSS Project, which focuses on community health analytics. Their key questions addressed workload distribution, project slowdown, and new contributor onboarding. Their metrics used included the percentage of work done by top contributors and response times.

Open Source Foundations

Arun Gupta from Intel discussed 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.

Metrics for OSS Sustainability

Vladimir Filkov from UC Davis and Charlie Schweik from UMass Amherst highlighted the importance of process-driven sustainability metrics. Their approach involved comprehensive metrics and analytics using AI, and they link the metrics to governance and policy actions.

Global Community Technology Challenge

Wilfred Pinfold from OpenCommons discussed efforts to get cities collaborating on consistent services through the Global Community Technology Challenge.

GitHub and WHO OSPO

Cynthia Lo from GitHub shared the development of an open source metrics dashboard for the social sector, focusing on repository health metrics that the World Health Organization found valuable.

https://github.com/WorldHealthOrganization/world-health-org-metrics

OSPO Levels and Responsibilities

Ana J. Santamaria from TODO, Linux Foundation, discussed the various responsibilities of OSPOs and the importance of demonstrating ROI. She emphasized enabling non-technical managers and shared resources for further learning.

Small-Group Discussion

The second half of the workshop engaged participants in  small-group discussions. In groups of 3, they discussed their goals and the challenges of measuring success. Each member had the chance to share their own perspective while the others practiced active listening and then gave feedback. After the small-group discussion, the groups could share with the other groups what they had discussed.

Get Involved and Drive Open Source Success

This workshop provided a primer to strategies to measure the value of working in the open. By leveraging the GQM approach, sharing organizational goals, and learning from real-world case studies, participants left with actionable insights to enhance their open-source initiatives.

To continue your journey in open source success, we encourage you to explore the following resources:

  • Join the CHAOSS Community: Dive into the world of community health analytics and learn how to apply metrics to your projects. Visit CHAOSS’s Quick Start for New Contributors to get started and join CHAOSS on Slack.
  • Participate in OSPOs4Good: Join the Slack community for ongoing discussions, support, and collaboration.
  • Explore the OSPO Landscape: Learn more about OSPO responsibilities and best practices through the Linux Foundation’s TODO Group.

Your involvement is crucial to advancing the open source movement. Whether you are just starting or are an experienced strategist, there are always new ways to contribute and innovate. Let’s work together to demonstrate and maximize the value of working in the open!

Sep 28 2023
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A group of CHAOSS community members taking a selfie on the bridge leading to the Bilbao old town area

CHAOSS at Open Source Summit Europe

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The CHAOSS crew was well-represented at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit event in Bilbao last week with several talks and panels from CHAOSS community members. 

On Tuesday, we held a panel discussion: Demonstrating OSPO Value with Daniel Izquierdo, Chan Voong, David Hirsch, and me. The idea for this panel came out of the CHAOSS OSPO WG, and during the panel we talked about how to demonstrate OSPO impact using metrics, practical applications for OSPOs, tools, and how to build a narrative for your stakeholders out of your data.

CHAOSS board member, Brian Proffitt, along with his Red Hat colleague, Natalie Pazmiño, held a session about the challenges of Measuring the Impact of Community Events, which can be harder to measure than traditional industry events that rely mostly on lead generation. They talked about creating collateral that can be measured (e.g., whitepaper downloads, landing pages via QR code) and creating opportunities for later participation in a channel that you can measure. They had some creative approaches, so I talked to Brian about the possibility of creating some CHAOSS metrics / metrics models to share their ideas.

Daniel Izquierdo and Yehui Wang had a session about Building SaaS Services with CHAOSS Technology to Evaluate Community Health and Sustainability where they talked about how CHAOSS’ GrimoireLab software is based on 16 years of research, development, and testing in the market, which made it possible for OSS Compass to be built on top of GrimoireLab in just one year! OSS Compass is a SaaS solution implementing CHAOSS metrics and metrics models, and the slides at the link above show examples of how they’ve implemented them. CHAOSS has brought great visibility for GrimoireLab, and the community has been a great amplifier. 

I also gave a talk about Contributor Growth Strategies for OSS Projects where I talked about the challenges that maintainers face and how hard it can be to get more people participating in a project along with some ideas for ways that these challenges can be overcome. I used several graphs from CHAOSS tools to demonstrate how metrics can help maintainers decide where to focus their efforts for growing their contributor base. The slides in the link above have more details about the challenges, solutions, and metrics. 

In addition to the talks from the Chaotics at the event, there were a few others that I found interesting:

  • Nithya Ruff’s keynote about the Evolving OSPO touched on several topics that we’ve been talking about recently in the OSPO WG. She talked about how risk can slow innovation, and how OSPOs are working hard to manage risks that include licenses, AI, security, and regulations.
  • Building On-Ramps for Non-Code Contributors in Open Source by Natali Vlatko and Celeste Horgan echoed many of the conversations we’ve had over the years in the CHAOSS DEI WG with some solid ideas for both maintainers and contributors about how to get more people engaged in your project through documentation, community, project management, and other roles.
  • There were also a bunch of other talks that were relevant for CHAOSS folks, especially some from the Diversity Empowerment Summit, Open Source Leadership Summit, and OSPOCon.

The individual session videos aren’t yet available, but the full day videos for some tracks are available, and this video from the Leadership track contains the talks from Daniel and Yehui (time index 16:20), Natali and Celeste (1:08:50), and my talk (2:05:01).

In addition to the content from the talks, Linux Foundation Research also released 4 new reports: The 2023 State of OSPOs and OSS Initiatives, The World of Open Source Europe Spotlight 2023, The European Public Sector Open Source Opportunity, and Open Source for Sustainability.

Overall, it was great to see many of my CHAOSS friends, some of them for the first time in person. We had great conversations and fun both at the conference and over pintxos, a traditional food in northern Spain’s Basque region.

Emilio and Miguel Angel at the Bitergia booth with an orange bitergia tablecloth and table covered in stickers, coasters, and other materials to give away.
Emilio and Miguel Angel at the Bitergia booth
Nov 16 2022
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Value Working Group Pivoting to Meet the Needs of OSPOs

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CHAOSS is very excited to be working more closely with the TODO Group as an Associate Member, to collaborate around open source community health metrics specifically for OSPOs. We often enjoy participation from folks working in OSPOs at all stages of their development, but previously we didn’t have a dedicated working group designed to address their specific needs. Coincidentally, we noticed over time that OSPO-relevant topics would pop up in our Value Working Group occasionally, and this was the place where OSPO managers would often enter the CHAOSS community. 

As a result, we decided to formally pivot our Value Working Group from focusing on measuring the value a community offers individuals and companies, to an OSPO Working Group that would focus on the specific needs and challenges of those in the OSPO space, regardless of industry. We also wanted to give OSPO managers a place to connect with each other to talk about their challenges with building and maintaining a successful open source program.

With this new direction of our working group, we are looking to the larger open source community to help guide and build this team. We would love to get feedback from those working in the OSPO space, whether it be in a company, for a university, or any other place. What kinds of things are you measuring? What would you like to measure? What have been your successes or barriers to getting the data you need? 

If you are interested in joining this conversation, we invite you to do 2 things:

  • Join the CHAOSS #wg-ospo Slack channel
  • Join the OSPO Working Group Bi-weekly meeting (The next one is November 17 at 11:00 am US Central/Chicago Time). Connection details can be found here. 

We’d love to include you in this group and hear what’s on your mind!