Tag Archives: sustainability

General

Good Governance for Open Source Projects

We all want our open source projects to be sustainable, healthy, and successful, and having good governance influences project success more than many people realize. I’ve had governance discussions with so many open source projects over the years. When I was co-chair of the CNCF Contributor Strategy Technical Advisory Group (TAG) we did governance  reviews and provided feedback for CNCF projects, and when I worked at VMware, Intel, and other companies, this was a regular topic that I discussed with employees who were leading and contributing to open source projects.

Last summer, I did a series of five blog posts on the topic of governance, so I think it’s time to revisit those posts. Here is a quick summary of each topic with a link to the post where you can learn more.

Governance Part 1: Why is it important?

Ultimately the focus of open source project governance is on the people. The roles we play, our responsibilities, how we make decisions, and what we should expect from each other as part of participating in the community. It also helps create pathways to leadership where other people can better understand the process for moving into leadership roles along with an intentional process for how the project promotes people into leadership. Being proactive about governance and related topics before something escalates into a crisis can make your projects more sustainable and reliable. 

Governance Part 2: Defining Governance

In general, you should start with the simplest possible governance model and only move to something more elaborate when your project evolves to the point where the complexity is needed because otherwise you create more overhead and extra work when that time would be better spent on project development, rather than governance processes. If you don’t already have your governance and decision-making processes documented, the best place to start is by documenting and formalizing what you are already doing when you make decisions for your project. The maintainer council governance model is a simple one that many projects can use as a starting point. 

Governance Part 3: New Contributors and Pathways to Leadership

Defining the roles and responsibilities for contributors, reviewers, and maintainers can help with recruiting new people into these roles. You can think of this as a ladder because contributors climb up to become reviewers and those reviewers can become maintainers. This helps set expectations for the roles and encourages people to think about how they might take on increasing responsibility within the project. As you get more of the people moving into maintainer roles, you can reduce the workload for the existing maintainers.

Governance Part 4: Creating Intentional Culture

Defining your governance / decision-making processes along with pathways to leadership are key to creating an intentional culture for your project that encourages participation and contributions from others. However, just documenting your governance process and setting expectations in writing isn’t enough. You should also be role modeling good behavior and helping others understand what behavior is appropriate within your project. It’s important to remember that tolerating bad behavior unwittingly sets the expectation that this behavior is acceptable in your project, which can drive new contributors away. Robust governance documentation that incorporates your code of conduct, charter (or similar statement of mission, scope, and values), and includes clear processes for dealing with conflict can help make your project more sustainable over time.

Governance Part 5: Overall Ownership of a Project

While there are a few exceptions, open source projects usually have an individual, company, or foundation controlling the trademarks, project infrastructure, and other assets. This overall ownership structure often impacts how the project is governed on a day to day basis and how the project is perceived by others. Neutral foundations provide a level playing field where contributors can contribute as equals regardless of whether they are contributing on behalf of a company or as an individual. This structure allows companies to collaborate together in a neutral environment where no single company is in control of the project.

I hope you enjoyed this short summary, and if you want feedback or help with governance or related OSPO topics, I’m available for consulting engagements.

Additional Resources:

General

From First PR To Lifelong Impact: Helping People Thrive in Open Source

I spend a lot of time thinking about the sustainability of open source projects and the role that contributor sustainability plays in overall project sustainability. This involves more than just attracting contributors, but in ensuring they stay, grow, and thrive within our open source projects, and that can be a lot easier if we think outside of our traditional boxes and get creative about recruiting and retaining contributors.

Within the CHAOSS project, some of our most successful initiatives are driven mostly or partly by folks from our CHAOSS Africa chapter. We also have a CHAOSS Asia chapter that has recently re-started and is also driving some interesting work within the project. As a result, I’ve seen first hand some of the challenges, but also the rewards, that come from making it easier for people to contribute from countries that haven’t always been well-represented in many open source projects.

On a similar note, until recently, I was co-chair of the CNCF Contributor Strategy Technical Advisory Group where we were working to help CNCF projects grow their contributor bases. The CNCF mentoring programs were managed out of this group, and I was struck by how many mentees stick around after their time in the program with some mentees even becoming mentors! Another initiative within this group was the Deaf and Hard-of-hearing Working Group where I was inspired by all of the amazing work to help folks more actively participate in CNCF events and projects! This work was so successful that a second group was created by people from the blind and visually impaired community with similar goals of making it easier for people to participate.

All of this work got me thinking about how traditional pathways into open source don’t work for everyone and that we need to expand our contributor pipelines beyond the usual audiences if we want to have more sustainable open source projects where everyone can feel comfortable participating. This was the idea behind bringing together a panel of experts at the recent Open Source Summit in Denver where I led a panel discussion about this topic with Shuah Khan, Ruth Ikegah, and Matt Denny. I hope you enjoy this video of our discussion!

Note: A huge thank you to Sandeep Kanabar who helped put this proposal together, but was unable to attend at the last minute, and thanks again to Matt for stepping in on short notice! 

If you want feedback or help with how to grow your contributor base or improve your open source strategy, I’m available for consulting engagements.

Resources and Links:

Related Fast Wonder blog posts:

Photo by The Linux Foundation used under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

General

Contributor Sustainability Impacts Risk and Adoption of OSS Projects

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years thinking about the sustainability of open source projects and the role that contributor sustainability plays in overall project sustainability. When I was co-chair of the CNCF Contributor Strategy Technical Advisory Group, contributor sustainability came up often as a concern for CNCF projects, and the most common question was about how to get more people contributing to our projects. This is a hard problem, but there are some resources at the bottom of this post to help grow your contributor base and increase the sustainability of your open source projects.

What I think many people underestimate is how contributor sustainability is viewed through the lens of risk by companies who are deciding whether to adopt your project. It’s easy to think that your project is different. No one will leave, and the project will be wildly successful forever, but that’s not how many companies think about open source adoption. Some companies think hard about which projects to adopt, especially if those technologies are crucial for delivering solutions to their customers, and would be difficult to replace if the project suddenly wasn’t available. Projects with a single dominant contributor or contributions coming almost entirely from a single company are going to be perceived as riskier and companies will be less likely to adopt or use those projects. This is especially true given the recent wave of companies relicensing open source projects and putting them under proprietary licenses. Put in simple terms, contributor sustainability risk makes it harder to get people to adopt your open source projects.

When I was Director of Open Source Community Strategy at VMware, I would often evaluate the risks of adopting specific open source projects, especially if we were considering building commercial products that incorporated those open source technologies in ways that were critical to delivering products to our customers. Contributor sustainability played a big role in deciding whether we would adopt a project. This was especially true for projects that were more strategically important for us, and which would be hard to replace if the project became unsustainable in the future. Given the choice, we’d select projects with better contributor sustainability, which would be a lower risk for us as a company.

Just last week, I was looking at an open source project where almost all of the contributions came from employees of the company driving the project, and there was a single lead developer who made the vast majority of the contributions and code reviews / approvals. That lead developer and their employer are single points of failure for the project. These single points of failure introduce risk for potential adopters and are likely to cause people to think twice before using a project. If I was a company looking for a solution, I would be unlikely to select a project that could suddenly cease to be updated (including security updates) if something happened to the dominant contributor or the company.

In summary, contributor risk stemming from a single person or a single employer makes your project riskier and less likely to be adopted.

While growing your contributor base is hard work, there are quite a few resources to help you improve contributor sustainability along with gaining a better understanding about how companies think about risk when adopting open source projects. Here are a few of those resources, most of which also have links to additional resources:

If you want feedback or help with how to grow your contributor base or improve your open source strategy, I’m available for consulting engagements.

Update: You might also be interested in reading this follow up post: Companies Can Mitigate Sustainability Risks

Photo by Jan Kopřiva on Unsplash

General

Using CHAOSS Practitioner Guides to Improve your OSS Projects

Within the CHAOSS project, we know that people often struggle to make productive use of the tsunami of data about open source projects. One of my focus areas over the past 2 years within the CHAOSS project has been to develop a series of Practitioner Guides designed to help develop insights that can be used to improve the project health of an open source project. So far, we have 5 guides: Introduction, Contributor Sustainability, Responsiveness, Organizational Participation, and Security with more guides coming soon.

I’ve written about these guides in an OpenSource.net blog post and recorded a CHAOSScast podcast about each guide. I’ve also done quite a few talks related to the topics in these guides, which can be found on my Speaking page. The most recent one was a joint talk with Peculiar C. Umeh at FOSS Backstage with a video that is available to watch.

I won’t go into more detail here, since I’ve already linked to other blog posts, podcasts, and talks on the topic, but I encourage you to have a look at the Practitioner Guides to find ways to make your open source projects healthier and more sustainable!

If you want feedback or help with your open source strategy, I’m available for consulting engagements.