Tag Archives: open source

General

Fixing the leadership gap threatening open source projects

I’m excited to be attending and presenting at my first ASF Community Over Code in October! It’s an event that I’ve always wanted to attend, but for whatever reason, I could never quite fit it into my schedule … until now. 

White ASF leaf logo and Community Over / Code Glasgow 2026 on a purple background.
Community Over / Code Glasgow 2026

This seems like the perfect time and place to deliver a brand new talk about what we can do to fix the leadership gap threatening open source projects. Anyone who knows me, or who regularly reads this blog, has seen that open source sustainability is an important topic for me, and open source needs sustainable leadership. We’re in a situation now where current leaders are burning out, retiring, or otherwise becoming unable to continue, which is creating a leadership gap with not enough new people having the opportunities or skills needed to move up within a project. The talk focuses on three topics: inclusive leadership principles, recruiting leaders, and good governance with a final section summarizing the actions that we can all take as individuals to fix the leadership gap. This blog post provides a preview of the talk.

Inclusive Leadership Principles

It’s important to have a variety of leadership roles that can act as a stepping stone to allow people to lead in smaller areas before moving to whatever you have as a top level leadership position. This can take the form of someone becoming a committer or reviewer, and then becoming maintainer. It might mean managing a community, leading documentation, managing projects, or becoming a chair of a working group, and then later moving on to a board or steering committee.

We’ve all seen projects where the same people sit in the same leadership positions year after year without providing opportunities for other contributors to move up within the project. If leadership positions aren’t available on a regular basis, then it can be difficult or impossible to promote people into leadership, which is why terms for boards or steering committees are important. Contributors can become disillusioned and disengaged if they don’t feel like there are enough opportunities within a project.

New and existing contributors feel more included when they can see other people in leadership positions who are like them. Without diverse leadership, underrepresented groups may face challenges in participating in and contributing to projects, losing valuable talent and ideas. It’s also important for people in leadership roles to role model good behavior and help others understand what behavior is appropriate within your project. Tolerating bad behavior unwittingly sets the expectation that this behavior is acceptable in your project, which can drive new and existing contributors away. 

Recruiting Leaders

This is a hard problem to solve. Sometimes it can be really difficult to get people to contribute to your project, and unfortunately, there is no magic or one size fits all solution. Some people are contributing as part of their job while others might contribute to gain experience or learn something. Clear communication, working in the open, public roadmaps, having good onboarding documentation, and reducing friction are key to helping people stick around. Having good first issues or help wanted labels are excellent places to start because these help people find something that they can work on while they learn more about the project. But, good first issues and help wanted labels are passive requests for help, so I also encourage people to be proactive and specific about ways that people can help. Asking someone specific to review a PR or answer a question from a user demonstrates that you recognize their unique expertise and want their help. 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 can help with recruiting into these roles. It can help to think about this as a ladder where contributors can climb up to become reviewers and those reviewers can become maintainers. What’s important is to document it and make sure that people understand how they can climb the ladder and gain more responsibilities within the project. Having a contributor ladder helps set expectations for the roles and encourages people to think about how they might take on areas of increasing responsibility within the project. As you get more of the humans moving into maintainer roles, you can reduce the load of the existing maintainers.

Good Governance

Projects can work toward more inclusive leadership practices where people feel welcome and included in project leadership, but you also need to have good governance practices and processes that make it possible for people to feel included and move up within the project. Good governance is a key element in fixing the open source leadership gap. I actually have a second talk on this topic in the Governance and Policy track at Community Over Code, and I’ve covered governance extensively here on this blog, so I’ll just share a few highlights as they relate to the leadership gap.

The tricky thing about governance is that it needs to be proactive. The time to work on governance is when things are going well. If you wait until there is a crisis within your community, you might not have the right processes for dealing with that crisis, and when a project is in crisis, it will be much more difficult to come to an agreement about governance.

Governance is one of those things that is never really finished. The governance processes that you need when you have only a couple of maintainers is likely to be insufficient if the project grows dramatically. As your projects evolve, your governance and your leadership should evolve along with them. But changing your governance processes to evolve with the changing needs of the project can be hard. People have feelings and any kind of change can be difficult, but this is especially true in many open source projects where people often become deeply and personally invested in their projects.

Take Action

Fixing the leadership gap in open source won’t just happen without all of us taking action. Here are a few suggestions for what you can do as an individual to help ensure that open source projects have the leadership to be sustained over time.

One of the things we can all do, but especially those of you working in companies, is to provide funding for open source, which can help to reduce the pressure on open source maintainers and projects. It can provide a way to pay more people to devote their time to an open source project. You can donate to individual projects via platforms like Open Collective or GitHub Sponsors. You can contribute to things like the Open Source Pledge. You can fund open source research via the Software Stewardship Lab. There are many ways to fund open source, and that’s something that we can all do.

Those of us who are established in our careers and in open source projects can use our influence and reputation in a project to help others gain visibility and opportunities that eventually result in someone new moving into leadership positions. We call this sponsorship, which is more than just mentoring, and can include things like inviting someone to co-present or join a panel at an event, providing opportunities to collaborate together on some aspect of a project, or other activities that give people new opportunities to learn and lead. 

I mentioned earlier that we’ve all seen projects where the same people sit in the same leadership positions year after year without providing opportunities for other contributors to move up within the project. If you’re one of those people, it might be time to take a hard look at whether you’re still providing the value to the project that you once did, or are you taking a space that could be offered to an up and coming person doing great work in the project?

This is something that I have personally been thinking hard about over the past several years, and I’ve started giving up leadership roles to allow other people to have the same opportunities I’ve had.

Summary

Fixing the leadership gap that is threatening open source project health and sustainability won’t just magically happen. It’s going to take work, and it’s going to require action from all of us, so take a hard look at the projects you’re involved in, and look critically at your own behavior. Think about how you can improve the governance for the projects you’re involved in and what you can do to improve inclusivity within those projects. Consider what you can do to help others move up within open source projects and how you can be a role model for leadership in open source. And most importantly, drive the change that you want to see.

If you want to attend this talk and other great talks on similar topics, I hope to see you at Community over Code in Glasgow October 11-14!

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

Additional Reading:

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

General

Part 4: Assessing Impact Using CHAOSS Practitioner Guides

This final post in my series about using the CHAOSS Practitioner Guides focuses on determining impact for two specific cases: Funding Impact Measurement and Research Software Impact. If you haven’t already read the previous posts in the series, I encourage you to pause and read those first:

Funding Impact

Much of the critical infrastructure that we all rely on is made up of open source projects that lack the resources to be properly maintained over the long term. Funders need to be able to understand the impacts of past funding in order to secure buy-in for future funding as well as 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.

The Practitioner Guide: Funding Impact Measurement has several things to consider when measuring impact:

  • Start by understanding the context. Accounting for funding objectives, project life stage and social structure, and regional and organizational cost factors is an important first step in measuring funding impact, since it provides important context.
  • Economic, social, and technological impacts can be both positive and negative, direct and indirect, internal (i.e. within a project) and external (i.e. among a project’s ecosystem of dependents and users), and manifest over various time horizons. When assessing the impacts of open source funding, there may be a tendency to focus on technological impacts, which may in part be due to the nature of open source or the relative ease of measuring data from repositories. However, the potential impacts of funding extend beyond the code itself, and it is crucial to consider economic and social impacts on projects and their wider ecosystems of dependents and users.
  • Methods. When it comes to measuring the impacts, funders can consider a breadth of methods for impact measurement. We recommend using a mixed methods approach, which provides a way to combine scalable quantitative measures along with contextual depth from qualitative data to better understand the funding impact.

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. Most of this guide came from a paper that I co-wrote with Cailean Osborne, Paul Sharratt, and  Mirko Boehm, so a big thank you to my co-authors and others from the CHAOSS Funding Impact Working Group for supporting this guide!

Research Software Impact

Looking at the impact of research software requires a very different approach from the corporate context, so we have a guide dedicated to that topic: Practitioner Guide: Research Software Impact. Software and open source community work does not have a history of being part of reappointment, tenure, and promotion cases and has not represented a traditional outcome of university research work. To make this even more complicated, there are no consistent international practices for using software identifiers or citing software. A huge thanks to Matt Germonprez and Clare Dillon for writing this one!

The guide highlights the importance of open source software and community work as significant scholarly outputs using several metrics for determining research software impact:

  • Contributor Absence Factor. For researchers and evaluators, the contributor absence factor is helpful in understanding how an open source project is growing to include contributors who are responsible for more than 50% of the code base.
  • New Contributors. A steady influx of new contributors may indicate a healthy, inviting project, while declines can be a signal for potential challenges in engagement or accessibility.
  • Project Velocity. A researcher can use the Project Velocity metric to report project velocity of their own open source project and compare project velocity across a portfolio of projects.
  • Change Requests. The Change Requests metric tracks the proposals for modifications to a project’s source code that have been submitted for review during a given time frame.
  • There are also additional metrics, like software citations and external funding, that may be used if they are available.

The guide focuses on the impact of open source software and/or communities created and maintained by individuals and teams as part of their research role, including evaluators who are part of researcher reappointment, tenure, and promotion cases. This guide focuses on open source software and communities developed and maintained by a researcher or team to recognize the social and technical impact from that work.

Summary

These are very different guides that both focus on assessing impact within slightly niche topics that only apply in specific situations. However, they would also be useful when brainstorming ways to assess impact in other situations. 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. In particular, I’m interested in working with organizations who need help assessing the impact of their open source funding initiatives.

Additional Resources:

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

General

Part 2: Additional Sustainability Topics From the CHAOSS Practitioner Guides

This is the second post in a series, so I encourage you to go back to read the previous post about Building Healthy and Sustainable Projects Using CHAOSS Practitioner Guides if you haven’t already read it. The first post covered the introduction, contributor sustainability, responsiveness, and organizational participation, which were the original 4 guides in the series. 

Shortly after we launched the Practitioner Guide series, we followed up with three additional getting started guides on security, diverse leadership, and sunsetting a project. As I mentioned in the first post in this series, starting with the Practitioner Guide: Introduction – Things to Think about When Interpreting Metrics can help interpret metrics in light of your unique situation. Again, 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, and each guide provides recommended actions.

Security

Open source project security impacts the health and sustainability for our projects, which ripples out across the entire software ecosystem as dependency / supply chain components. Because security is a complex and critical topic, this Practitioner Guide: Getting Started with Security is designed only to get you started on your path toward improving the security of your project; it is not a comprehensive guide to everything you need to know about open source project security. The guide has suggested starter metrics that include OpenSSF Best Practices Badge, Libyears, and Release Frequency along with additional metrics that might also shed light on the security of a project. 

Recommendations for improvement from the security guide include:

  • Secure your code repository by managing access, implementing branch protection, managing contributions, and more.
  • Create a detailed security policy document (usually in a SECURITY.md file) with instructions for reporting security vulnerabilities along with documenting how the project will respond to those reports, including managing embargoes.
  • Keep your dependencies up to date and use tooling (e.g., Dependabot) to help identify and update your dependencies.
  • Make sure that your security fixes land in a release as soon as possible.
  • Working your way through the OpenSSF Best Practices badge criteria is also a good way to make security improvements.

Diverse Leadership

Without diverse leadership, underrepresented groups may face challenges in participating in and contributing to projects, losing valuable talent and ideas, so a huge thank you to Peculiar C. Umeh who drove the creation of the Practitioner Guide: Getting Started with Building Diverse Leadership! The guide focuses on three key metrics: Board/Council Diversity, Sponsorship (supporting people, not financial sponsorship), and Inclusive Leadership. The data collected can provide valuable insight, but storing, interpreting, and acting upon it requires careful thought to protect identities and be respectful of the people whose data has been collected.

Actions to take include to improve diverse leadership:

  • Start by creating and communicating clear pathways for contributors to grow into leadership roles, which may include creating sponsorship opportunities and transparent criteria for leadership positions.
  • Hold existing leaders accountable for promoting and improving inclusive leadership.
  • Implement programs that encourage diverse representation in leadership and promote diverse perspectives.
  • Regularly monitor and evaluate the diversity of all leadership roles by collecting and analyzing survey data and reporting progress to the community.

This was a challenging guide to write, and it can be a challenge to implement these recommendations. Open source communities are often global and encompass diverse people and backgrounds, so there is a need to avoid imposing a one-size-fits-all approach and be open to adapting strategies to fit the unique needs and values of different groups within your community. Each project should ensure that their practices are inclusive, making all members feel heard and valued, regardless of their background or identity.

Sunsetting (Winding Down and Archiving)

The Practitioner Guide: Getting Started with Sunsetting an Open Source Project is quite different from the other getting started guides because it’s not about making project health improvements or increasing sustainability, but instead about responsibly and proactively shutting a project down when it’s reached a natural end. It’s important to remember that not every open source project can or should exist forever: technologies evolve, corporate priorities change, and people’s interests change. Part of the beauty of open source is that we work in the open as we innovate, and some of those innovative projects will stand the test of time, while others should be responsibly deprecated via a sunset process. The guide looks at several metrics to determine whether a project is still active, Change Requests, Issues New, and Technical Forks, but the guide also covers other reasons for sunsetting a project. 

Once you’ve decided to sunset a project, there are several recommended steps:

  • Communication should start with any existing contributors, since there may be contributors who would like to continue the project. When you decide to sunset the project, this needs to be communicated to existing users in a transparent manner and being clear about the reasons for sunsetting it.
  • Do a code and security review to get it into the best possible shape before archival.
  • Review and resolve open issues and change requests (PRs / Merge Requests), including marking some as ‘won’t fix’.
  • Use the checklists and tools linked from the guide to help with this work.
  • Officially archive the repositories and consider adding the code to Software Heritage for preservation over time.
  • There are also recommendations for handling the special case of sunsetting an active project, which can happen when a company changes strategy or when an individual needs to step away. 

Sunsetting a project is not an indication of failure and should not be positioned as such. Projects have life cycles; they endure for as long as they are needed and then they should be responsibly deprecated when they are no longer needed. Consider providing transition details, and if possible, tooling that helps your existing users transition to an alternative solution if a reasonable one is available. I’d also like to express my thanks to Stefka Dimitrova whose work drove much of the content in the guide and to the team from the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services OSPO who made significant contributions and improvements to the sunsetting guide.

Summary

Improving open source project security and increasing diverse leadership can help a project become more sustainable over time, but when a project has reached the end, it can be responsibly sunsetted, instead of being abandoned. The CHAOSS Practitioner Guide series can help with all of these activities. Come back next week for the next post in this series, ‘Part 3: Determining Value and Viability Using CHAOSS Practitioner Guides’.

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.

General

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.

General

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.

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

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:

General

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!

General

Power Dynamics, Rug Pulls, and Other Corporate Impacts on OSS Sustainability at SCALE 2026

As many of you know, this isn’t a new topic for me. I’ve written here about what your OSPO can do about power dynamics, rug pulls, and other corporate impacts on OSS sustainability along with a post on the OpenUK blog, The Shifting Power Dynamics in Open Source: Rug Pulls, Relicensing and Forks, and on The New Stack, Clouds, Code, and Control: The New Open Source Power Struggle. I’ve also given other presentations on this topic, so you can watch the video from the recent Open Source Summit EU (OSSEU) in Amsterdam, which Jon Corbett did a lovely job of summarizing in his LWN Coverage of the talk. 

I’ve been continuing to think about how power dynamics and rug pulls impact OSS sustainability, and I had an opportunity to talk about this at SCALE 2026 in Pasadena last weekend! I already blogged about how much I love SCALE, so I won’t continue to gush about how great it is. SCALE gave me a bit more time than I’ve had for the other presentations, so I added some new slides about other types of rug pulls beyond the relicensing and forks that I’ve previously focused on. I talked more about MongoDB, which kicked off the recent wave of relicensing when they relicensed under the newly created Server Side Public License (SSPL), which didn’t result in a fork. I also talked about some examples of rug pulls that came about when images / releases were put behind a paywall (Bitnami / Linkerd). My slides are a bit sparse, but available, and SCALE will also release the video of the talk if you want more details.

Resources:

I’m available for consulting engagements focused on open source strategy, contributor strategy, improving project governance, and related topics.