Today’s innovation is fueled by software, particularly open source software, which has a greater impact than ever. Future innovation growth and maintenance are dependent on the open source community. Businesses who see this are leading change and meeting the issues head-on by fostering cross-industry collaboration, knowing how to assist their open source developers, and giving back to the open source community.
They understand that a strong, devoted, and enthusiastic open source community, consisting of hundreds or thousands of people, is essential for success. The success of the initiative depends on their cooperation. Given the variety of components that make up an open source project, managing all facets of it can be difficult. For instance:
- Project’s scope and goals
- Participating members, maintainers, and collaborators
- Management and governance
- Legal guidelines and procedures
- IT services
- Source control, CI/CD, distribution, and cloud providers
- Communication channels and social media
To assist open source communities in designing and adopting a successful project strategy that takes into account all the moving pieces, the Linux Foundation offers a number of tools through LFX. So, how do they manage to do it? Let’s investigate that using an example from the Hyperledger project.
- Recognize Your Participation in the Project
Participants can register the identity they are using to contribute their code to GitHub and Gerrit through the LFX Individual Dashboard (Since the Hyperledger project uses both). The application then connects users’ contributions, affiliations, memberships, education, certificates, badges acquired, and general information using that identity.
Other LFX tools use this data to collect and transmit data visualisations that show the community’s activity in GitHub and Gerrit for the various Hyperledger repositories. Additionally, it shows participation in issues, codes, and detailed contribution data. Managers and organisations may easily manage their project memberships, find related projects to join, and comprehend the team’s involvement in the community with the aid of the LFX Organization Dashboard. It offers specific information on:
- Code contributions
- Committee members
- Event speakers and attendees
- Training and certification
- Project enrollments
The project’s members and participants must be identified in order to better understand how their contributions contribute to the project’s success and how their participation affects other participants.
- Control the Procedures for Your Project
Program managers can arrange their project participation, IT services, and easy access to additional LFX technologies with the help of the LFX Project Control Center, which provides a one-stop portal.
Additionally, project managers can link:
- Their project’s source control
- Issue tracking tool
- Distribution service
- Cloud provider
- Mail lists
- Meeting management
- Wiki and hosted domains
For instance, Hyperledger can connect services like GitHub, Jira, Confluence, and their communication channels like Groups.io and Twitter accounts. It can also evaluate each participant project and observe all associated organisations within the Hyperledger Foundation’s umbrella. It is simpler for managers to view their project scope and comprehend how all of their services affect the project’s performance when all the project’s aspects are managed in one location.
- Extend Your Reach and Promote Your Project
To guarantee that your project reaches the ears of its target audience, social and earned media are crucial. Having clear visibility into your project’s effect in the open source community and the areas where it is having the biggest impact is also crucial. High-level metrics on a project’s social media account are provided by LFX’s Insights Social Media Metrics, including:
- Twitter followers and following information
- Tweets and retweet breakdown
- Trending tweets
- Hashtag breakdown
- Contributor and user mentions
We can see the split of tweets and retweets for Hyperledger in general. Additionally, we can observe the impact that Bitcoin News’ tweets are having on the relevant groups.
You can adjust your communication and marketing strategies to reach out to the sources that open source participants rely on to get the most recent information on how the community contributes and interacts with others by using insights to analyse how your project impacts other regions and reaches diverse audiences by language. For instance, a global languages map with direct and indirect impressions calculated makes Hyperledger authors’ tweets in English, Japanese, and Spanish visible.
