Manrique Lopez

Open source is becoming the main ingredient for companies to success. To achieve it, companies need to manage efficiently their relationship with open source projects. And that’s the main goal for companies’ Open Source Program Office (OSPO). So, they are key for companies success. But, additionally, they could be very important for open source projects sustainability.

During this talk, you will learn about the responsibilities and benefits of having an OSPO in your organization, why should companies adapt to open source and adopt an OSPO, how it makes a difference to have a team responsible for viewing, managing, making critical decisions, contributions back to open source projects, and providing oversight for open source initiatives on their company and where they should start. Also, we will give real examples of how companies are doing this today and their impact for the community.

Additionally, you will learn about communities and initiatives to help you having a successful OSPO, like OpenChain Project, TODO Group and CHAOSS, the importance of CHAOSS to give actual data and insights about open source projects and a bigger perspective with analytics and how data and metrics from the OSPO can help companies tackle their corporate strategy.

We will present some typical community management worries about community health, productivity and visibility and how some open source tools could be used to face them. Open source development transparency allows community to behave as data scientists and extract valuable information.

During last years, we have seen the growth of an specific position in many companies and OSS foundations. You might have seen them as “community managers”, “developer advocates”, “developer relations”, etc. All of them share some goals / responsibilities in common with their communities: health, productivity and visibility. How to achieve them?

It has been said that “without data, you are another person with an opinion”, and management shouldn’t rely in opinions but facts. This path increases transparency, trust and reduces conflicts, since usually “numbers speak louder than opinions”.

If we look around in our daily live many of us are already working with tools for similar goals in different areas of life. We can wear heart rate monitors, check our activity in github or jira and play with zillions of marketing campaigning tools.

In OSS communities people “contribute” for a goal. So, we should start by looking at where people are contributing, and here starts the “community manager nightmare”. People contribute in a lot of places: github, gerrit, jira, mailing lists, slack, meetup, etc. It seems obvious which data sources we have and since most of us are technical people, we might build our own tools for tracking them. Have you already gone through that path? Some of our best friends have gone, wasting 80% taking data instead of taking decisions. Lots of places to look at, mainly silos of data you need to massage to get information out of them, and limited amount of time understand and manage your project.

During this talk, we will present some community managers typical questions and how tools OSS, like for example GrimoireLab, could be used to answer them, allowing the community to behave as data scientists extracting valuable information from within and be a data driven community.

These kind of tools represent a new ecosystem for “Open Development Analytics”, where communities can (and probably should) rely on open tools to ensure transparency on such important process like “measuring the community”.