Every other Thursday, the Common Metrics Working Group of CHAOSS meets to discuss about metrics that matter from a generic point of view for the health of open source projects.
Continue reading “The geographical distribution of open source and internal contributors”
Mentoring is one of those activities key in any open source communities as well as in any other environment such as internally at companies. The new edition of the OpenStack gender report [to be published], produced by Intel and Bitergia, has focused specifically on those programs that help newcomers and filling the existing knowledge gap.
Continue reading “Analysis of the retention rate of the Outreachy program in OpenStack”
Not everything in inner source is about community building [but a big portion!] and the infrastructure is basic to foster collaboration, transparency and community building.
Continue reading “Key aspects when inner-sourcing your infrastructure”
When looking back nowadays to the work done on diversity, I’ve realized that it has been quite a trip! My first approach to the topic was in an informal meeting with Nithya Ruff, currently at Comcast. She mentioned that the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo reached (as far as I remember!) 13% of women attending the Summit. And this was a great number if compared to previous summits as the percentage kept growing. But she also mentioned that they received a tweet asking about the current number of technical contributions. Then this is where we decided to have a look at that issue: have numbers, and try to produce some of them from a quantitative point of view.
Continue reading “Gender Diversity Studies and Talks Summary”
[Extra material available at the Open Source Leadership Summit talk and its slides in the Bitergia’s Speakerdeck account]
“The idea is beginning to take root in even the most secretive corporate cultures… Its power lies in the inherent social nature of the creative process. When developers are able to access, use and build upon what their colleagues are creating, innovation can really take hold.”
Phil Granof in Wired
As we detailed in the previous post, adopting Inner Source practices creates great benefits for companies such as saving cost, faster time to market and enabling innovation.
There’s no doubt that Inner source needs a different approach to project management but “hands on!” What’s the best project to start Inner Sourcing?
Software is becoming the core of most business, even the traditional ones. However it doesn’t mean that companies should build all the software they need, most of it can be easily bought or outsourced with low cost, in order to focus their efforts on their core business. Thus, Inner Source should help to add value to organizations running away from commodity.
This was the case for Philips Healthcare. Klaas-Jan Stol and Brian Fitzgerald in their article Inner Source—Adopting Open Source Development Practices in Organizations recommended to start with a seed project. That means, not starting from scratch but choosing an existing initial implementation of a software product or component.
Frank Van Der Linden, CTO at Phillips was responsible for and pioneered the setting up Inner Source within the company. He decided to start with a component suite of DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine) standard, used in many medical imaging tools such as x-ray and MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanners. Philips Healthcare has a product line for diagnostic techniques in Hospitals, so they chose a core business software product for Inner Sourcing.
Van Der Linden reports enormous business benefits using Inner Sourcing as a process for developing:
Philips and other companies running Inner Sourcing learned from Open Source projects, they understood how to align and coordinate efforts. In the next post, we will talk about essential tools to enable Inner Sourcing.
One of the first tasks done by a developer during the day is to choose where to go and what to fix. Backlogs are quite useful for this purpose, either using Kanban and directly having a look at the open issues waiting lists project by project as in the case of GitHub, or using any other manual or automated method.
For this engineering focus we have started to produce some panels whose main purpose is to help developers to make decisions. As this is still in its first stages there is room for improvement, but this hopefully shows how powerful this could be. The displayed panel is part of the open analytics panel produced for the CoreOS community.
This panel aims at providing information at three main levels:
Continue reading “Getting your project backlog with GrimoireLab. CoreOS use case”
The EclipseCon starts today in France. And for this special occasion we are landing a new version of the open analytics platform for Eclipse today. This is intended to be used for community purposes, but also for engineering teams and for those curious about how this community performs over time and nowadays. Luis Cañas will talk about this during the Conference, do not miss his talk!
The entry point for the dashboard is the Overview page. There a summary of each of the available data sources is displayed together with some filters that help to understand the evolution and current state of the activity and the community of Eclipse.
Continue reading “Landing the new Eclipse Open Analytics Dashboard”
Public quarterly reports are used for understanding the performance of companies. And so, quarterly reports done by Bitergia fill the gap of understanding the performance of open source communities. This type of analysis focuses on those that are still interested in metrics, but do not have the time to play with the dashboards. This indeed provides a full overview of the current quarter, but adds a comparison with the previous quarters. This allows to have some extra context about where the community is heading.
Continue reading “On the Importance of Quarterly Reports : OPNFV and OpenStack as use cases”
In Bitergia we have a list of happy customers using the Metrics Grimoire toolset (fork them at GitHub!) to produce metrics about their communities. Tracking tech communities is not that simple and this needs of some infrastructure. And one of the main issues usually consists of aggregating all of the information.
