Why is this so hard! Conveying the business value of open source

Watch talk on YouTube

Bob a Program Manager at Google and Kubernetes steering committee member with a bunch of contributor and maintainer experience. The value should be rated even higher than the pure business value.

Baseline

  • A large chunk of CNCF contributors and maintainers (95%) are company affiliated
  • Most (50%) of the people contributed in professional personal time (and 30 only on work time)
  • Explaining business value can be very complex
  • Base question: What does this contribute to the business

Data enablement

  • Problem: Insufficient data (data collection is often an afterthought)
  • Example used: Random CNCF selection
    • 50% of issues are labeled consistently
    • 17% of projects label PRs
    • 58% of projects use milestones
  • Labels provide: Context, Prioritization, Scope, State
  • Milestones enable: Filtering outside date range
  • Sample queries:
    • How many features have been in milestone XY?
    • How many bugs have been fixed in this version?
    • What have I/my team worked on over time?

Triage

  • Many projects don’t triage b/C
    • Auth (No Role that can only edit labels+milestones)
    • Thought of as overhead
    • Project is too small
  • Tools:
    • Actions/Pipelines for auto-label, copy label sync labels
    • Prow: The label system for Kubernetes projects
  • People with high project, but low code knowledge can triage -> Make them feel recognized

Conclusions

  • Consistent labels & milestones are critical for state analysis
  • Data is the evidence needed in messaging for leadership
  • Recruiting triage-specific people and using automations streamlines the process

Communication

Personas

  • OSS enthusiast: Knows the ecosystem and project with a knack for discussions and deep dives
  • Maintainer;: A enthusiast that is tired, under pressure and most of the time a one-man show that would prefer doing technical stuff
  • CXO: Focus on resources, health, ROI
  • Product manager: Get the best project, user-friendly
  • Leads: Employees should meet KPIs, with slightly better tech understanding
  • End user: How can tools/features help me

Growth limits

  • Main questions:
    • What is this project/feature
    • Where is the roadmap
    • What parts of the project are at risk?
  • Problem: Wording

Ways of surfacing information

  • Regular project reports/blog posts
  • Roadmap on website
  • Project boards -> GitHub’s feature for this is apparently pretty nice

Questions by leadership

  • What are we getting out? (How fast are bugs getting fixed)
  • What is the criticality of the project?
  • How much time is spent on maintenance?

Conclusion

  • There is significant unrealized value in open source