2.8 KiB
2.8 KiB
| title | weight | tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Why is this so hard! Conveying the business value of open source | 3 |
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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