(Culture Goal) Belonging to the open source community
Description
This activity is about developing a feeling of belonging to the greater open source community among developers. As with every community, people and entities have to participate and contribute back to the whole. It reinforces the links between practitioners and brings sustainability and activity to the ecosystem. On a more technical side, it allows to choose the priorities and roadmap of projects, improves the level of general knowledge and technical awareness.
This activity covers the following:
- Identify events worth attending. Connecting people, learning about new technologies and building a network are key factors to get the full benefits of open-source.
- Consider Foundation memberships. Open-source foundations and organizations are a key component of the open-source ecosystem. They provide technical and organizational resources to projects, and are a good neutral place for sponsors to discuss common issues and solutions, or work on standards.
- Watch Working Groups. Working groups are neutral collaborative workspace where experts interact on a specific domain like IoT, modeling or science. They are a very efficient and cost-effective mechanism to tackle common, albeit domain-specific concerns together.
- Budget participation. At the end of the journey, money is the enabler. Plan required expenses, allow people paid time for these activities, anticipate next moves so the program doesn't have to stop after a few months short of funding.
Opportunity Assessment
Open source works best when done in relation with the open source community at large. It facilitates bug fixing, solution sharing, etc.
It is also a good way for companies to show their support to open-source values. Communicating about the company's involvement is important both for the company's reputation and for the open-source ecosystem.
Progress Assessment
- Measure: Number of events people could attend, number of talks given, amount of money invested in open-source projects.
- Question: Can people submit events participation requests?
- Question: Can people submit projects for sponsorship?
Tools
I think we can dismiss this section for this activity.
Recommendations
- Survey people to get to know what events they like or would be the most beneficial for their work.
- Setup in-house communications (newsletter, resource center, invitations..) so people know about the initiatives and can participate.
- Make sure that these initiatives can benefit various types of people (developers, administrators, support..), not only c-level executives.
Resources
- What Motivates a Developer to Contribute to Open-Source Software? An article by Michael Sweeney on clearcode.cc
- Why Companies Contribute to Open Source An article by Velichka Atanasova from VMWare
- Why Your Employees Should Be Contributing to Open Source A good read by Robert Kowalski from CloudBees
- 7 ways your company can support open source An article from Simon Phipps for InfoWorld.
- Events: The life force of open source An article by Donna Benjamin from RedHat.