
We just launched the latest in our Practitioner Guide series with a guide on Demonstrating Organizational Value. As you can imagine, this is a big and difficult topic, so this is our most ambitious guide so far, and it’s our first guide outside of the “Getting Started” series of guides.
The idea for this guide came about as a result of several conversations with Bob Killen around the time of his KubeCon talk: Why is this so hard? Conveying the Business Value of Open Source (slides and video) along with the White Whale talk from the Linux Foundation Member Summit. After seeing these talks, I knew that I wanted to work with Bob to turn his ideas into a practitioner guide.
I’m co-chair for the CHAOSS OSPO (Open Source Program Office) Working Group, and the topic of how to demonstrate the value of our work in open source has been a popular topic of conversation since we started the group. However, given the current financial climate and the number of OSPOs that have been the targets of recent cutbacks and layoffs, this feels like a particularly important topic right now.
Creating an open source contribution strategy can help organizations frame their discussions with leadership to demonstrate the value of their open source efforts in ways that resonate with leadership. At a minimum, the open source strategy should contain details in the following areas, which are each addressed in the “How to Take Action” sections contained in the guide:
- Supporting your organization’s goals
- Determining which open source projects are the most critical for your organization
- Assessing open source project health risk
- Prioritizing within your organization’s limited resources
- Measuring & framing value
I hope you find this guide useful as you think about how to demonstrate the value of your open source initiatives within your organization!
Related blog posts:
- Using CHAOSS Practitioner Guides to Improve your OSS Projects
- From Data to Action: Building Healthy and Sustainable Open Source Projects
- Contributor Sustainability Impacts Risk and Adoption of OSS Projects
Photo by Farhat Altaf on Unsplash