Monthly Archives: June 2026

General

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)

General

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:

General

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: