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Part 1: Building Healthy and Sustainable Projects Using CHAOSS Practitioner Guides

Metrics can provide deep insights into our open source projects, but they can also be overwhelming, and because every open source project and every situation is a bit different, metrics require interpretation. And that’s only the first step. Interpreting the metrics and figuring out what they are telling you is only useful if you take the additional step of driving appropriate actions to make decisions and improvements based on those metrics. I’ve been working in open source and using metrics for decades, but for me the metrics have never been what’s important. They are simply the means to an end, a way to make improvements or demonstrate whether we are accomplishing our goals. 

This is why I focused on creating the CHAOSS Practitioner Guide series during my three years as CHAOSS Director of Data Science, and I’m proud of what we, as a community, accomplished with these guides. I’ve written quite a few blog posts about the individual guides, but I wanted to take some time here to reflect on the guides and talk about how they can be used together as a cohesive whole. The guides roughly break into two categories, which I’ll address in a series of four blog posts. The first category focuses on health and sustainability of open source projects. This post is about the first category, ‘Building Healthy and Sustainable Open Source Projects’, with part 2 coming next week to cover ‘Additional Sustainability Topics From the CHAOSS Practitioner Guides’. The second category of guides are the more advanced ones dealing with complex topics, like value, viability, and impact, that span multiple projects. Part 3 in the series focuses on value and viability while part 4 will cover determining impact.

Overview

We launched the Practitioner Guide series with a few getting started topics that apply to almost every open source project: contributor sustainability, responsiveness, and organizational participation.

The guides are paired with as ‘Introduction – Things to Think about When Interpreting Metrics’ as a starting guide with more details about how to interpret metrics in light of your unique situation. The introduction has general suggestions about how you should spend time understanding the goals of the project and talking to the people working within the project as key inputs into interpreting metrics. When it comes time to look at the metrics, focusing on trends over time for just a few metrics can help cut through the noise before drilling down into the details where there might be a potential issue. This is why each getting started guide focuses on just a few metrics to get started with tips for expanding to additional metrics as needed.

Every project is a little different, so it’s essential to interpret the metrics in light of a project’s individual needs and ways of operating. It’s also important to remember that metrics are more than just data, they represent actual human beings, so it’s important to be careful about comparing people against each other in ways that might result in the punishment of individuals. The non-human data (e.g., bots, automation, AI) should also be carefully taken into account in your interpretation of metrics. The Introduction – Things to Think about When Interpreting Metrics guide has more details about how to think about metrics and use what you’ve learned productively and ethically.

Contributor Sustainability

The Practitioner Guide: Getting Started with Contributor Sustainability focuses not just on determining whether you have enough contributors to sustain a project over the long-term, it also has tips for increasing contributor sustainability while keeping in mind that new contributors can also create additional burdens on the time of already overloaded maintainers. The guide includes Contributor Absence Factor, Contributors, and Types of Contributions as the key metrics to start investigating contributor sustainability.

To improve contributor sustainability, here are just a few of the recommendations from the guide:

  • Start by looking at your existing contributor base to determine whether you have people who are ready to step into a maintainer role, even if they start by maintaining just a sub-project. If there are people who are almost ready, some mentoring or reviewer roles might be a good first step. 
  • Before starting to recruit new contributors, it might help to review and update existing contributor guides and other onboarding documentation to help people get up to speed quickly while requiring less help from existing maintainers.  
  • Good first issues and help wanted labels can help new contributors get started on something productive, especially if those issues are created with the information that a new contributor needs to know to accomplish the task.
  • Be proactive about asking people for help with specific tasks. Knowing that we’re wanted and appreciated makes us feel good, which can be a strong motivator to contribute to an open source project or to continue contributing.
  • Defining the roles and responsibilities for contributors, reviewers, and maintainers as a contributor ladder where contributors can climb up to become reviewers and those reviewers can become maintainers can help with recruiting new people into these roles. 
  • Think about how people can move into leadership positions to be responsible for documentation, community management, marketing and other important roles.

Responsiveness

Responsiveness is one of the most important factors in attracting newcomers and retaining existing contributors for a project. The Practitioner Guide: Getting Started with Responsiveness uses Time to First Response, Time to Close, and Change Request Closure Ratio as the key metrics to help determine whether a project is responding to requests in a timely manner. It can be tempting to attempt to solve issues with responsiveness by putting more pressure on existing maintainers by asking them to respond more quickly and resolve more contributions, but this rarely solves the long-term problem. It might result in short-term gains, but it could be damaging to the community and the project over time if you are burning out your maintainers by not resolving the underlying problems that are causing the lack of responsiveness in the first place.

Some suggestions for improving responsiveness from the guide include:

  • As suggested in the contributor sustainability guide, start by looking at whether you can promote some existing contributors into reviewer or maintainer roles.
  • Use the project’s contributing documentation to set expectations about when to expect a response to a contribution.
  • Use issue and change request templates to help contributors make good contributions that require less work from maintainers.
  • Talk to your maintainers and find out where they are spending too much of their time and focus documentation or recruitment in those targeted areas.

Note that responsiveness is hard to diagnose because many things can impact responsiveness, so don’t be discouraged if your first attempt doesn’t result in improvement.

Organizational Participation

Organizations can have a significant impact on the health and sustainability of an open source project. On the one hand, organizations can help sustain projects over time by employing people to work on projects, but they also introduce risk (e.g., from relicensing, strategy shifts, acquisitions) when one organization is too dominant. From a contribution standpoint, it can be difficult if one organization has all of the influence and other people don’t feel like they are participating as equals.

The Practitioner Guide: Getting Started with Organizational Participation uses three primary metrics, Organizational Influence, Organizational Diversity, and Elephant Factor, to understand organizational participation. 

The recommendations for improving organizational participation depend on whether the improvement is coming from the dominant organization. From the dominant organization:

  • Contribution documents should be clear about whether contributions are accepted from people outside of the organization and whether those people can move into leadership positions. Transparency and setting expectations can reduce frustration from other contributors.
  • Spend some time thinking about why the project isn’t getting contributions from other organizations. Is all of the work happening in the open, and can others easily find decisions and discussions in public channels? If not, some work might be required to redirect private conversations into the public channels.
  • Promote opportunities to contribute via social media, conferences, and other channels.
  • Use your existing connections to other organizations who are using the project to encourage specific people to contribute.

From outside of the dominant organization: 

  • Engage in the project to determine whether contributions are really welcome.
  • If so, encourage your employees to contribute to the project as part of their time at work. Don’t expect employees to contribute to work projects in their free time.

Being transparent is critical. Saying one thing in the documentation and doing another can damage your organization’s reputation more than just being honest and transparent about how people can (or cannot) contribute to a project. If you are considering using an open source project as a key component of your organization’s products or infrastructure, you should think very carefully about that decision when that project is controlled by a single organization.

Summary

Increasing contributor sustainability, improving responsiveness, and garnering participation from a variety of organizations can all help improve the health and sustainability for an open source project. Check back next week for the second blog post in this series about security, diverse leadership, and sunsetting an open source project. As always, if you want feedback or help with open source strategy, sustainability, governance, or related open source topics, I’m available for consulting engagements.

Additional Resources:

As with everything I write, this was written by a human without the use of LLMs or other AI assistance.

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Launching the Software Stewardship Lab

I’m excited to be a part of the new Software Stewardship Lab, which is launching today! The Software Stewardship Lab is a new organization dedicated to funding research on open source sustainability, a topic very near and dear to me that I’ve been focused on for the past few years. The entire technology ecosystem relies on open source infrastructure, and there are some great organizations funding maintainers and projects, but at the Software Stewardship Lab, we’re focused on funding the research that helps us all answer questions about important topics like analysis of critical dependencies and packages analysis, which ones are / are not well-maintained, and how the maintainers of those open source projects are handling the load while avoiding burnout. 

I’m part of the team shepherding this effort. Many of the others are people that I’ve been following and have a deep respect for the work that they have been doing, so I am looking forward to continuing to learn from all of them! The team includes: Our Executive Director Vlad-Stefan Harbuz (Open Source Pledge / Open Source Endowment), Andrew Nesbitt (ecosyste.ms), Miranda Heath (report on burnout in Open Source), Daniel Roe, (Nuxt / npmx), Matias Capeletto aka patak (npmx), Mike McQuaid (Homebrew), and myself.

But we can’t do this alone. We’re looking for organizations to fund the important research that we’re doing at the Software Stewardship Lab, so that people can get paid for focusing on research around software supply chain security and maintainer burnout. Please have a look at our sponsorship page for more details about how you can help support this critical work.

You can learn more about the lab by reading our announcement post and exploring our website.

I mentioned earlier that open source sustainability is a deeply important topic for me. I think it’s important for maintainers to have the funding and other resources that they need to build projects that can become sustainable over the long haul. I’ve written many articles related to open source project sustainability, so I won’t say more now, but will instead point you to a few previous posts from my blog:

If you want feedback or help with open source strategy, sustainability, governance, or related open source topics, I’m available for consulting engagements.

As with everything I write, this was written by a human without the use of LLMs or other AI assistance.

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Measuring OSPO Value: A new Linux Foundation Report

Regular readers of this blog know that helping organizations demonstrate the value of their open source efforts is something I’ve been focused on for a while, and it’s one of the consulting services that I offer. I recently summarized some of my thoughts on this topic into a single blog post where you can learn more: A Strategic Approach to Demonstrating the Value of OSS Efforts.

This is why I was so delighted to review and provide feedback on a recent Linux Foundation report on this topic along with writing a blog post summarizing the report. The blog post originally appeared on the Linux Foundation blog, but I wanted to also re-post it here for reference.

Measuring OSPO Value

Originally posted on 29 June 2026 at https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/measuring-ospo-value

Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) play important roles within organizations, but that role isn’t always appreciated or understood within the executive team or by other stakeholders. In the current financial climate, some OSPOs have been the targets of cutbacks and layoffs, so this is a particularly important time for OSPOs to be clear about the value that they provide to their organization. Leaders within every organization are responsible for making sure that their organization focuses on the activities that have the biggest impact on helping that organization achieve their goals. As a result, OSPOs need to be able to demonstrate that the value of their work can have a larger impact on the organization than the other initiatives that are also competing for resources. As the CHAOSS OSPO Metrics Working Group co-chair and CHAOSS board member, the topic of measuring OSPO value is one that I have cared deeply about for years, and I recently gave a talk on this topic at the Open Source Summit North America in May. This is why I was so excited to read Ibrahim Haddad’s latest report, Measuring OSPO Value: A Framework for ROI, Resilience, Risk Foresight, and Strategic Influence, and share a few highlights from the report in this blog post.

It’s easy to say that OSPOs should be better at measuring value, but it’s not quite that straightforward. OSPO value has always been difficult to measure because much of the work is preventative, the effects are distributed throughout the organization, the impact is spread across multiple time horizons, and the work is cross-functional. However, it’s become increasingly urgent with the ubiquity of open source software impacting revenue-critical systems, security and supply chain expectations increasing, regulations having a bigger impact on open source, and AI-generated code adding complexity.

There is no one way to measure OSPO value, so the report uses a framework with 4 interrelated dimensions that can help OSPOs reason about value from multiple perspectives that can be applied through the lens of their unique organizational goals.

ROI and cost avoidance. In my experience, when executive leadership and finance are questioning an OSPO’s value, they usually start by asking questions about ROI, but this narrow framing doesn’t tend to be particularly useful in my opinion. OSPOs don’t typically generate direct revenue, but they can have an impact on cost avoidance, including reduced duplication, improved efficiency, and lower maintenance costs that can be used for financial justification.

Resilience. Engineering and security leadership on the other hand want to better understand how the OSPO is helping the organization avoid disruption through preparation related to visibility and management of dependencies, SBOM coverage, licensing or provenance concerns, and readiness around engineering decisions. When this is done well, everything proceeds smoothly and crises are avoided, but this is why measuring resilience proactively is an important part of measuring OSPO value.

Risk foresight. While resilience is about preparedness, risk foresight is about detecting potential issues early enough to mitigate the impact and avoid incidents. This includes detecting potential license issues, governance problems, supply chain concerns, security vulnerabilities, and regulatory / policy changes. This value can be measured and communicated by documenting near-misses and creating a narrative around how the OSPO took action to prevent the issues. The CHAOSS Assessing Viability Practitioner Guide provides additional insight into this dimension.

Strategic influence. This dimension measures an OSPO’s long-term value, including how the OSPO strategically invests in the open source ecosystem with presence, engagement and influence in technologies, standards, and organizations that are critical for the organization now and in the future. We also covered some of this in the CHAOSS Demonstrating Organizational Value Practitioner Guide.

The report also highlighted a few principles for building a measurement system across these 4 dimensions, including measuring outcomes (not activities), focusing on a smaller number of indicators, using both quantitative and narrative approaches, explicitly documenting assumptions, distinguishing between enabled value and owned value, avoiding metrics that punish disclosure, designing for maturity, stating framework limits, and having metric continuity. Ultimately, all of this work to measure and demonstrate value needs to be communicated to executives and other stakeholders in a way that they can understand the importance of the OSPO. Ibrahim’s report has more details on tailoring communications to specific audiences, using scorecards, evolving your approach over time, and a practical roadmap for implementation.

If you work in an OSPO or do open source work within an organization, now is the perfect time to rethink how you measure and demonstrate the value of this work, and this report is a great way to get started or get you thinking about how you can improve your existing approach to measuring OSPO value.

Link to read the full report.

I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post! If you want feedback or help with your open source strategy and how to demonstrate value for your organization, I’m available for consulting engagements.

Related blog posts:

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From Active To Archive: Shepherding Repositories Through Their Sunset

I’ve blogged before about how not every open source software project can or should live on forever: priorities change, technologies evolve, and interests shift over time. You don’t want to have neglected or abandoned open source projects with security vulnerabilities owned by your organization. However, responsibly sunsetting an open source project is more than just clicking the archive button on your repository. This was the premise behind the CHAOSS Practitioner Guide: Getting Started with Sunsetting an Open Source Project.

The Open Source Program Office at the Digital Service at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in the US Government built on the CHAOSS sunsetting practitioner guide, contributed their improvements back into the guide, and built tooling to automate some of the tasks! They’ve done some excellent work, so I was thrilled when they asked me to join them to talk more about all of this at the recent Open Source Summit North America! The slides and video are available if you want to have a look at what we discussed.

Additional Reading:

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United Nations Open Source Week

I’ve been fortunate to be able to attend the UN Open Source Week event again this year at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City where they bring the open source community together with government and policy folks to facilitate collaboration and information sharing. For these first several days, the overarching theme is around digital sovereignty with people seeing open source as a way to build public goods together. There were concerns about how technology has been consolidated into the hands of a few, but that open source and events like this one help us change that by embracing the freedom that open source offers. AI is seen as both an opportunity and a challenge with some AI cheerleading, while also expressing concerns that AI is trained mostly on the work of a few with many people not being represented in the training data. Overall, open source is seen as a partnership model to allow all of us to build public goods together. 

Dawn smiling standing next to the UN Open Source Week Sign

One of my favorite things about this event is how people use it as an opportunity to get people together outside of the main event. While it may not seem like FOSDEM and a UN event would have much in common, they both have many side events that spring up to take advantage of the people they bring together. Like with FOSDEM, some of my best moments at the event have been during the conversations that I’ve been having with other open source folks during breaks, lunch, parties, and the hallway track!

The first day, I took advantage of the Maintainathon, which was part of the main program, but was organized separately by the Sovereign Tech Agency (STA) who brought an entire maintainer delegation with them to the event. It was great seeing people talking and collaborating around the specific concerns that maintainers have ranging from governance issues to more technical concerns. This was covered well already in the STA’s LinkedIn post.

My Tuesday started with a breakfast hosted by the STA at the German House. We had short remarks from Sovereign Tech Agency Managing Director Adriana Groh, Parliamentary State Secretary Thomas Jarzombek from Germany’s Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation, Amandeep Gill, UN Under-Secretary-General and Special Envoy for Digital and Emerging Technologies, Dr. Wolfgang Gehring, OSPO Lead at Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation, Bastien Guerry, Head of Partnerships at Software Heritage, and Tiffany Farriss, CEO of Palantir.net and longtime Drupal Association board member. You can read more in the STA LinkedIn post about the breakfast.

On Wednesday, I was invited by the CURIOSS crew to their side event hosted at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation offices as a special guest where we had some really interesting demos and discussions about measuring open source impact for academic OSPOs.

A few of us from CHAOSS started the day on Thursday with a breakfast meetup at a nearby coffee shop where I got to have interesting conversations with some awesome CHAOTICs before the main event!

OSPOs for Good

Thursday is the OSPOs for Good day, which is the main reason that I attend the UN Open Source Week. Again, the overarching theme has been about digital sovereignty. 

It started with a few keynotes. H.E. Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni, Minister Delegate in charge of Digital Transition and Administrative Reform, Kingdom of Morocco talked about how open source plays a fundamental role for long-term control of critical digital services to produce contextualized solutions to meet the needs of Moroccan people and are making strategic investments in open source to benefit from international cooperation while remaining in control of their future. Angellah Jasmin Kairuki, Minister of Communication and IT, United Republic of Tanzania spoke about how OSPOs allow governments to share and reuse what works for digital public goods with open source as a critical trigger for digital sovereignty that puts citizens first to change the posture from passive consumers. Bernardo Mariano Junior, Assistant Secretary-General and Chief Information Technology Officer, UN Office of Information and Communications Technology talked about how this event brings open source passion to the united nations from across the globe with open source as a strategic enabler allowing us to move faster toward digital sovereignty. Jim Zemlin, CEO of The Linux Foundation talked about AI and open source making similar points as what he delivered in the recent Open Source Summit North America. Louise McKeever, Chief Information Officer, Department of Agriculture, Food, & the Marine in Ireland spoke about their policy of open source first and how open source provides transparency, flexibility, and resilience for digital sovereignty.

Up next in the main room was a panel about Open Source and Digital Sovereignty in a Connected World moderated by Ruth Suehle who opened by talking about how the UN charter reflects open source principles. Sachiko Muto talked about how open source is coming to the top of the agenda again as it has been before, but now public sector OSPOs are the key to turning these endorsements of open source into operational capability to make it a reality. OSPOs unlock the ability to collaborate across both private and public sectors with public sector OSPOs playing a key role. Adriana Groh spoke about how the STA shows that the government can play a role in supporting the open source ecosystem via public money for public code, but there is also a need to be able to demonstrate impact for how you’re spending public money. Volunteers don’t maintain public infrastructure, like roads and bridges, so we shouldn’t expect them to maintain our critical digital infrastructure, either. Frank Karlitschek talked about how open source is strategic and critical in today’s geopolitical environment, but challenges for adoption are not technical. Arun Gupta spoke about OSPOs as a catalyst for interoperability and choice. 

After this we moved into breakout sessions. The first one I attended was about Financing Open Source and Digital Public Goods: A Multi-Stakeholder Approach discussing how we pay to sustain the digital ecosystem that we need over the long-term with a multi-stakeholder approach. DPGs need sustainable business models and implementers acting in the public interest to support those DPGs over the long-term. It should be a state responsibility to support the digital infrastructure that we all rely on, and the STA is piloting an impact measurement framework based on CHAOSS metrics to show that the public money has been well-spent. Supporting open source is not about charity, and governments need to get involved. Using tax payer money requires accountability for open source, but needs to be done in a way that doesn’t place the burden on those open source maintainers.

For the second breakout I went to ‘From Policy to Practice: Establishing Government OSPOs in Low- and Middle-Income Countries’, because I’m interested specifically in learning more about the progress they’ve made since I last heard about the OSPOs in Kenya and the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. These 2 OSPOs were funded by the EU as pilots to build capabilities to allow more use of open source and to do it in a way that is more likely to be successful. There are also many commonalities between these 2 OSPOs and how they were established. Here’s an overview of what each of them are working on:

  • Kenya OSPO: Embedded in the Ministry to be self-sustaining over time. Their implementation needs to be aligned with core strategies of the Kenyan government and data protection policies. Focus areas include: training programs for open source to build capacity, programs for the local developer community, German-Kenyan digital dialog on open source, and as a foundation for the Kenya open source sovereign stack to make it easier for the government to select from the many OSS projects.
  • Trinidad & Tobago OSPO: Aligns with key strategies and plans focused on digital sovereignty. They are also embedded in the Ministry to be self-sustaining and have a remit to support the entire government. Focus areas include: a new national open source policy (including procurement policies putting open source first), shepherding a government-wide repository and software asset management register, a partnership with the University of West Indies for training government staff, and advising on OSS projects (including NextCloud implementation).  Historically, many countries have relied on big, proprietary software companies because they don’t have the capabilities and the OSPO is designed to change this and build these capabilities locally both for public servants and school children to build the next generation.

The next main session was about Open Source at the United Nations. The digital divide remains a problem in many less developed countries. Open source isn’t a niche issue, it’s essential as a practical pathway to bridge digital divides, and the UN is working hard to strengthen their use of open source to go further, faster. Open source allows the different groups within the UN to collaborate together and share ideas to build transparent and resilient technologies while protecting the free flow of information. The UN has been shifting to using open source more strategically to address geopolitical risks with flexibility and independence.

The final OSPOs for Good panel is Strategic Independence Across Layers of Governance. Open source is central to the digital policy agenda at the EU, and it is a fundamental part of their digital sovereignty strategy. This requires a transition from consuming to participating and collaborating. It’s not about standing apart, but moving to shared stewardship around the world. Open source provides strategic independence for governments to choose the solutions that best meet the needs for their specific countries. Open source itself isn’t the end goal; it needs to meet the needs of a country and support their goals. Brian Behlendorf worries about the long-term sustainability of open source software built by governments where they could be a single election away from no longer supporting a particular technology, but by working together with the private sector we might be able to work together for more sustainable open source software. Nithya Ruff mentioned that OSPOs can serve as a function to direct changes and connect institutions across governments for strategic independence and collaboration in open source.

I really enjoyed the entire OSPOs for Good day, and I’m looking forward to the Open Source Week Community Day tomorrow!

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Thoughts on Governance

Having good open source project governance allows us all to collaborate and work together to build more sustainable, healthy and successful projects. It’s something I’m particularly passionate about, and I’ve frequently written about it here on this blog. I collected all of those links in this post: Good Governance for Open Source Projects. Writing those posts made me realize that I hadn’t given a full presentation about governance in a while, so I was excited to have the opportunity to speak about Proactive Governance to Build Sustainable Open Source Projects at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit NA in Minneapolis in May 2026. The slides and video for that talk are now available.

While I spend more time talking about open source project governance, I’ve also started thinking more about public governance and how open source can be a key part of a digital sovereignty strategy. But the open source impact on public governance goes beyond just digital sovereignty, which is why I was so excited to be invited by OpenGov Africa to talk more about the intersection between open source and public governance last week. The slides and video for that talk are also online.

Related Resources:


Image by the CNCF (CC BY-NC 2.0)

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A Strategic Approach to Demonstrating the Value of OSS Efforts

OSPOs and other open source teams often struggle to demonstrate the value of their work in a way that resonates with the people in leadership positions within their organization. The topic of demonstrating open source value is one that I’ve been blogging about and giving presentations about frequently over the past year, so this blog post is a way for me to collect all of that work in one place to make it easier for people to find.

In the CHAOSS OSPO Working Group, which I co-chair, the topic of how to demonstrate the value of our work in open source has been a popular topic since we started the group many years ago. However, given the current financial climate and the number of OSPOs that have been the targets of cutbacks and layoffs, this feels like a particularly important topic right now.  This is why we created a CHAOSS Practitioner Guide all about Demonstrating Organizational Value, which I blogged about when the guide was launched.  In a second blog post on the topic, More about Demonstrating Organizational Value, I talked about the episode of CHAOSScast where Bob Killen and I joined Harmony Elendu to share our thoughts about how organizations can more effectively demonstrate the value of their open source efforts.

I expanded on this topic in another blog post, OSPO Contribution Strategies to Demonstrate Value. This post highlights how to articulate the importance of your contributions to upstream projects as part of a broader open source strategy, which often has 2 components: 1) identifying which projects are most strategic / critical for your organization and 2) creating contribution strategies for individual projects. The blog post has examples of how I did this when I worked at VMware and Pivotal.

I’ve also presented on this topic several times recently, but I wanted to highlight the two most recent talks, since they are the most comprehensive examples of these presentations. I blogged about my talk for the folks from CURIOSS (Community for University and Research Institution OSPOs) where I expanded on the content in the guide to also include more about how to demonstrate value in a university context. I further expanded it beyond corporate and university contexts to include how government / public sector organizations can demonstrate the value of their work in my talk at the Open Source Summit in Minneapolis a few weeks ago. Here’s the video and slides for this most recent version of the talk.

If you want feedback or help with your open source strategy and how to demonstrate value for your organization, I’m available for consulting engagements.

Related blog posts:

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How OSPOs can Measure the Impact of OSS Funding

So much of the critical infrastructure that we all rely on contains open source projects that are under-resourced and struggling. One (of many) ways to help these projects is by funding development and maintenance so that contributors can focus on this work, but times are tough. Organizations and OSPOs are feeling the pinch, and it can be hard to justify continuing to fund open source projects. Measuring the impact of open source funding is something that I’m passionate about because the best way to continue to get leadership to give you money to fund open source is by showing them the impact of that funding. 

However, measuring the impact of funding isn’t easy, and there is no one approach, since the goals and objectives for funding vary widely for different types of funding organizations and different open source projects. It’s also important to consider that not all funding provides positive outcomes, since money can introduce tension within projects. In 2024 to help organizations navigate these challenges, I collaborated with several people to write an academic paper on this topic: A Toolkit for Measuring the Impacts of Public Funding on Open Source Software Development. We recently turned this paper into the CHAOSS Practitioner Guide: Funding Impact Measurement, which is much shorter and focused on practical steps that organizations can take to justify the impact of funding provided to open source projects and maintainers. 

The guide talks about the challenges of funding and the lessons we’ve learned along the way in addition to a section to help you navigate the actions that you can take to measure the impact. The “How to Take Action” section of the guide has three sections. 

  • First, start by understanding the context. This includes understanding the funding objectives and how the funding is structured for the projects being funded, considering project life stages and social structures, and accounting for salary structures and cost factors for different types of contributors across multiple regions.
  • Second, look at economic, social, and technological impacts across multiple dimensions. The potential social, economic, and technological impacts can be both positive and negative, direct and indirect, internal (i.e. within a project) and external (i.e. ecosystem), and manifest over different time horizons. The guide contains examples of how to think about each of these areas.
  • Third, using various methods to combine scalable quantitative measures along with contextual depth from qualitative data to better understand the funding impact. Mixed-methods approaches offer the best of both words: scalability and contextual depth. The guide and the paper have more details about how to do this.

This post doesn’t tell you how to justify getting new funding for open source efforts, so if you want to start funding open source projects, you need to demonstrate the value of that work to your leadership. There is a Demonstrating Organizational Value practitioner guide, and I’ve talked about demonstrating organizational value in several posts on this blog, which are linked in the “Related Resources” section below to provide a starting point. However, even if you haven’t yet started funding projects, you can still put together a plan for how you’ll measure the impact of that funding as part of demonstrating the value and making a case to your leadership along with the funding request.

I’ll conclude with a short quote from the guide:

“Funders need to be able to understand the impacts of past funding in order to secure buy-in for future funding as well as to adapting and/or innovating funding approaches whilst mitigating ineffective or even harmful approaches. We all benefit from more public institutions, philanthropic organizations, and companies giving money to open source; when done in a way that positive impact is the ultimate goal and objective. We hope that this guide helps organizations measure the impact of their funding initiatives so that we can increase the funding to open source projects to drive future improvements and allow these projects, and the people working on them, to become healthier and more sustainable over time.”

If you want help with measuring the impact of your funding or with other OSPO strategy topics, I’m available for consulting engagements.

Related Resources:

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CURIOSS: Demonstrating Open Source Value

The lovely folks from CURIOSS (Community for University and Research Institution OSPOs) invited me to join them in March as part of their Deep Dive series of talks. I gave a quick overview of CHAOSS before diving into one of my favorite topics: demonstrating the value of open source efforts. This is the first time I’ve given this talk with some additional content about how to demonstrate value in a university / academic context, which is a bit different from how we think about value in corporate environments.

The slides and video are available for you to enjoy!

Related resources:

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Transitions

TL;DR version: As planned, my time as the CHAOSS Director of Data Science has come to an end, but I’ll still be around the CHAOSS community as a board member and Working Group (WG) lead. I’ll be taking April and most of May off before transitioning into open source strategy consulting starting in June.

The CHAOSS Director of Data Science role was funded by an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant for 3 years, so the plan was always to move on to something else when it ended in March 2026. I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished in 3 years, so a huge thank you to the folks at the Sloan Foundation for the funding that allowed me to focus on this over the past few years. When I started this work, one of the first steps was to create the CHAOSS Data Science WG, which has allowed us to grow the data science community. We started the Practitioner Guide series within the WG and have published almost a dozen guides on a wide variety of topics! We also launched several research projects in addition to the Relicensing and Forks project that I’ve been focused on over the past few years. You can learn more about what we’ve accomplished by reading our updates from January 2025, June 2025, and November 2025. I feel confident that the CHAOSS data science community and the WG are in good hands as I step down and leave the work in the very capable hands of the other 2 co-chairs, Cali Dolfi and Sal Kimmich, and maintainer, Ernest Owojori.

However, I’m not leaving the CHAOSS community. I’ll still be on the CHAOSS Governing Board and will continue co-chairing the OSPO WG, Funding Impact Measurement WG, and the Education WG. All of these WGs have co-chairs, so WG meetings will continue and nothing should change while I’m enjoying some time off to rest and recharge in April and May. The only exception to my time off is to attend the Open Source Summit in Minneapolis in May, since I didn’t want to miss it. I’m disappointed to need to say this, but I also wanted to make sure people know that this transition and the time off has been planned for over a year and has nothing to do with the current drama unfolding in the CHAOSS project this week.

What’s next? While I’ve enjoyed being able to focus on data and metrics over the past few years, I’ve found that I missed working on open source strategy, which has been my focus over the past two decades. The data science work was a fun diversion, but now I’m ready to get back to my roots. Starting in June, I’ll be shifting into open source strategy consulting. This is NOT a temporary solution while I figure out what to do next. My plan is to continue consulting on a part-time basis while I free up some time for my other hobbies (reading, working out / running, designing 3D prints, traveling), and to continue to do this for as long as I remain able to work. 

You can learn more about my consulting business on my consulting website, but here are a few focus areas:

  • Open Source Strategy: Crafting strategies for your OSPO, open source teams, or product teams that help employees focus their open source work in areas with the most impact along with demonstrating the value of your open source efforts to your executive team.
  • Contributor and Community Strategy: Strategies and techniques for growing your contributor base and improving sustainability for the open source projects driven by your organization and when working upstream.
  • Governance: Documenting and improving project governance processes for open source projects along with providing advice when there are governance issues or concerns.
  • Research and Data Analysis: Open to a variety of research and data projects to answer questions you have about open source projects from understanding an existing contributor base to doing audits of your GitHub organizations to understand the status of your repositories.

If you’d like my help in any of these areas, please reach out to me in June!

Open source, research, and other stuff I'm interested in posting.