Tag Archives: value

General

More about Demonstrating Organizational Value

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. This is why we created a CHAOSS Practitioner Guide all about Demonstrating Organizational Value, which I blogged about in July when the guide was launched. Since then, it’s still been something I’ve continued to spend quite a bit of time thinking about!

Bob Killen and I recently joined Harmony Elendu for an episode of CHAOSScast to share our thoughts about how organizations can more effectively demonstrate the value of their open source efforts. We talked about the guide and shared some of our own stories about what we’ve done at past companies to demonstrate the value of our teams’ open source work. It’s only 23 minutes long, so I hope you enjoy listening to our conversation!

I’ll also be at OSPOlogy Lyon on November 5 & 6 where I’ll be giving a 20 minute talk about Demonstrating the Value of Open Source Efforts, which is based partly on the content from the guide along with my own experience working within organizations to demonstrate open source value. It’s in person, but free to attend, so I hope to see some of you in Lyon!

OSPOlogy hosted by LF Energy and Réseau de Transport d’Electricité (RTE) on 5-6 November 2025 in Lyon, France on a purple-blue background. Profile picture of Dawn Foster with text underneath reading, Speaker Dawn Foster with the CHAOSS logo.

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General

Demonstrating Organizational Value

Yellow shocked emoji with dollar sign eyes

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!

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Photo by Farhat Altaf on Unsplash