Tag Archives: value

General

Measuring OSPO Value: A new Linux Foundation Report

Regular readers of this blog know that helping organizations demonstrate the value of their open source efforts is something I’ve been focused on for a while, and it’s one of the consulting services that I offer. I recently summarized some of my thoughts on this topic into a single blog post where you can learn more: A Strategic Approach to Demonstrating the Value of OSS Efforts.

This is why I was so delighted to review and provide feedback on a recent Linux Foundation report on this topic along with writing a blog post summarizing the report. The blog post originally appeared on the Linux Foundation blog, but I wanted to also re-post it here for reference.

Measuring OSPO Value

Originally posted on 29 June 2026 at https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/measuring-ospo-value

Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) play important roles within organizations, but that role isn’t always appreciated or understood within the executive team or by other stakeholders. In the current financial climate, some OSPOs have been the targets of cutbacks and layoffs, so this is a particularly important time for OSPOs to be clear about the value that they provide to their organization. Leaders within every organization are responsible for making sure that their organization focuses on the activities that have the biggest impact on helping that organization achieve their goals. As a result, OSPOs need to be able to demonstrate that the value of their work can have a larger impact on the organization than the other initiatives that are also competing for resources. As the CHAOSS OSPO Metrics Working Group co-chair and CHAOSS board member, the topic of measuring OSPO value is one that I have cared deeply about for years, and I recently gave a talk on this topic at the Open Source Summit North America in May. This is why I was so excited to read Ibrahim Haddad’s latest report, Measuring OSPO Value: A Framework for ROI, Resilience, Risk Foresight, and Strategic Influence, and share a few highlights from the report in this blog post.

It’s easy to say that OSPOs should be better at measuring value, but it’s not quite that straightforward. OSPO value has always been difficult to measure because much of the work is preventative, the effects are distributed throughout the organization, the impact is spread across multiple time horizons, and the work is cross-functional. However, it’s become increasingly urgent with the ubiquity of open source software impacting revenue-critical systems, security and supply chain expectations increasing, regulations having a bigger impact on open source, and AI-generated code adding complexity.

There is no one way to measure OSPO value, so the report uses a framework with 4 interrelated dimensions that can help OSPOs reason about value from multiple perspectives that can be applied through the lens of their unique organizational goals.

ROI and cost avoidance. In my experience, when executive leadership and finance are questioning an OSPO’s value, they usually start by asking questions about ROI, but this narrow framing doesn’t tend to be particularly useful in my opinion. OSPOs don’t typically generate direct revenue, but they can have an impact on cost avoidance, including reduced duplication, improved efficiency, and lower maintenance costs that can be used for financial justification.

Resilience. Engineering and security leadership on the other hand want to better understand how the OSPO is helping the organization avoid disruption through preparation related to visibility and management of dependencies, SBOM coverage, licensing or provenance concerns, and readiness around engineering decisions. When this is done well, everything proceeds smoothly and crises are avoided, but this is why measuring resilience proactively is an important part of measuring OSPO value.

Risk foresight. While resilience is about preparedness, risk foresight is about detecting potential issues early enough to mitigate the impact and avoid incidents. This includes detecting potential license issues, governance problems, supply chain concerns, security vulnerabilities, and regulatory / policy changes. This value can be measured and communicated by documenting near-misses and creating a narrative around how the OSPO took action to prevent the issues. The CHAOSS Assessing Viability Practitioner Guide provides additional insight into this dimension.

Strategic influence. This dimension measures an OSPO’s long-term value, including how the OSPO strategically invests in the open source ecosystem with presence, engagement and influence in technologies, standards, and organizations that are critical for the organization now and in the future. We also covered some of this in the CHAOSS Demonstrating Organizational Value Practitioner Guide.

The report also highlighted a few principles for building a measurement system across these 4 dimensions, including measuring outcomes (not activities), focusing on a smaller number of indicators, using both quantitative and narrative approaches, explicitly documenting assumptions, distinguishing between enabled value and owned value, avoiding metrics that punish disclosure, designing for maturity, stating framework limits, and having metric continuity. Ultimately, all of this work to measure and demonstrate value needs to be communicated to executives and other stakeholders in a way that they can understand the importance of the OSPO. Ibrahim’s report has more details on tailoring communications to specific audiences, using scorecards, evolving your approach over time, and a practical roadmap for implementation.

If you work in an OSPO or do open source work within an organization, now is the perfect time to rethink how you measure and demonstrate the value of this work, and this report is a great way to get started or get you thinking about how you can improve your existing approach to measuring OSPO value.

Link to read the full report.

I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post! 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

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.

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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

A Strategic Approach for OSPOs 

I think we’ve all been on teams where everyone is working, but no one is thinking about whether it’s the “right” work. It can be too easy to go on autopilot and keep doing the same things without thinking about whether / how those activities fit within the goals of the overall organization. I’ve built my career around taking a strategic approach to the work that my team is doing by making sure that our efforts support the overall strategies of the organization. Most recently, I did this as Director of Open Source Community Strategy at VMware and before that as Pivotal’s Open Source Strategy Lead. I’ve given loads of conference talks and written many blog posts with this strategic approach as the underlying theme. Last week, I read a LinkedIn post and blog post from David Hirsch that got me thinking more about this, and those ideas just kept rolling around in my head until I decided that I should blog about how OSPOs (Open Source Program Offices) can take a more strategic approach. 

One piece of David’s post talked about how OSPOs can play a critical role in digital sovereignty for European companies by helping them make better technology choices at a strategic level. I believe that this is absolutely critical for European companies, but thinking strategically is also important for all OSPOs, which is the focus of this post.

Being proactive and thinking strategically about how you are helping your organization meet their goals and objectives is something that can help your OSPO stand out as an important part of the business. This is especially true for new OSPOs, since it can help you justify continuing and growing your open source efforts, but it’s also something that established OSPOs should revisit regularly to make sure that you are still doing work that is valued within your organization. OSPOs often struggle to demonstrate the value of their work in a way that resonates with the people in leadership positions within their organization. Creating and regularly updating an open source strategy can help OSPOs frame their discussions with leadership to demonstrate the value of their open source efforts in ways that resonate with leadership and show how the open source works fits into the strategy of the organization as a whole. Once you have an OSPO strategy that aligns with the strategy of your organization, then you can figure out what you need to measure to show whether you are achieving your goals.

Another area that can benefit from an OSPO’s more strategic approach is in assessing risks and viability of the open source projects that your organization is consuming. Many organizations don’t have a rigorous or strategic process for selecting the most viable dependencies. Often product teams, or even individual software developers, select open source projects because they fill a particular technical need without any assessment of the viability of the project or the risks they might be taking by using it. Is the project controlled by a single company or a foundation? Who contributes to the project? Is the project at the risk of a rug pull or similar disruptions? Assessing the viability of open source projects, especially ones that have the potential to impact your business, is a good first step toward managing risk and reducing the chances of potential business disruptions. But it’s also important to look beyond just assessing the viability of individual projects and to look at viability and risk with a more holistic approach that includes assessing the risks associated with cloud infrastructure, data storage and access, use of AI models, vendor lock-in, and more.

Another critical piece of an OSPO’s strategy is around contribution to open source projects. By having employees actively participating and contributing to the projects that are most strategic for your organization, they can influence project direction, fix bugs, add features, otherwise improve the health and sustainability of the critical projects for your organization. I also like to think of contribution as a way to anticipate and mitigate risks as part of thinking about viability. When assessing viability, you can include whether contributing to a project might help improve viability. Organizations have the power and resources to make real improvements within open source projects, and corporate involvement and contribution can positively impact the sustainability of our projects.

I only scratched the surface of a few topics here. It isn’t possible to cover every part of an OSPO’s strategy in one blog post, so there are certainly other areas, like business impacts, licensing and compliance, governance, policies, and more. What’s important is to think about what your organization is trying to achieve and how your OSPO can play a strategic role in helping your organization be successful. If you want feedback or help with your open source strategy, I’m available for consulting engagements.

Additional Resources:

Photo by Karolina Kołodziejczak on Unsplash

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.

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

Demonstrating Organizational Value

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! 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:

Photo by Farhat Altaf on Unsplash