Yet another list of indicators (literature)

[GeorgLink]

Word of caution: These are early thoughts (pre-dating interviews).

Health factors:

“Indicators that inform the current condition and state of an open source community.”

“The second dimension, a healthy commons, is concerned with the quality of contributions and the quality of software produced by the community.” [3]

• How can we get rapid technological help from an OSS community? [2]
• How can we assess the quality of OSS products and the maturity of OSS projects? [2]
• Communication
• OSS community maintains a brand [4]
• Informs about news and releases (blog, twitter) [4]
• Website and Documentation are up-to-date [4]
• Marketing the Community [3]
• Quality of product (software)
• Unit Tests [4]
• Document project [4]
• Audit code for safety [4] (~Heartbleed, Shellshock)
• Quality of community
• Communication among members
• Decision making process
• Positive experience [3]
• Trust in Leadership of Project Leaders [3]
• Demonstration of Reciprocity [3] / build trust
• Forum kept alive [4]
• Respond to users requests / bug reports [4]
  • In a timely manner (following up on unanswered messages)
• Collaborates with upstream / downstream projects [4]
• Adheres to project road maps, keeps timelines [4]
• Enriching Knowledge [3]
• Face-to-Face Meetings [3] / Conferences, BoF, Workshops

Sustainability factors (= Risk Management)

“Indicators that inform the ability of an open source community to last or continue for a long time.”

“A definition for “sustainable opensourcing” is lacking; hence we define it as the ability of an opensourcing project to (1) prevent the community from being damaged so that it exhibits the continuity of its software development and maintain software of the firms’ interest (healthy community), and (2) nurture and improve the information commons of the project over a predetermined period of time (healthy commons).” [3]

• (How much longer does an OSS project sustain? [2])
• (How can we understand and identify OSS licenses? [2])
• Focused project management
• Maintain focus, don’t alienate community with frequent changes [4]
• Long term veterans maintain community / project
• Research often ignores behavioral measures that impact members’ desire to work together in future [1]
• Quality of community processes / values
• Focus on quality assurance
• Management of team
  • Deal with difficult members [5]
• Long term strategic planning / requirement analysis / road maps [1], [6]
• Marketing the Community [3]
• Member outflow is balanced by inflow
• Financial stability [4]
• Maintain Compatibility with upstream and downstream projects [4]
• User base
• Government: Align strategic development with government guidelines for OSS selection [7]
• Constant reevaluation of current use of tools
• Project growth and changes in project structure make processes obsolete [5]

Community Tools (tangible antecedent to health and sustainability)

• Source Code [4] / Code repository
• Documentation [4] / Wiki, Man page, Books, Website
• Issue reporting [4] / Bug tracker, Issue tracker, Project management
• Communication [4] / Mailing list, Forum, IRC channel, Blog, Archives (dev focus)
• Dissemination [4] / Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Newsletter, Blog, Website, Conference publications, Journals, Trade fairs (user focus)

Comments

• [2] Introduces commonly-asked industry questions about OSS for business use.
• [3] Employs a case study to reveal six mechanisms for sustainable OSS.
• [4] Builds a new OSS community and discusses essential elements and risks.
• [5] Provides a tutorial with best practices for running an OSS.
• [7] Discusses national strategies for supporting OSS.

References

• [1] K. Crowston, K. Wei, J. Howison, and A. Wiggins, “Free/Libre Open-source Software Development: What We Know and What We Do Not Know,” ACM Comput. Surv., vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 7:1–7:35, Mar. 2012.
• [2] A. Ihara, A. Monden, and K.-I. Matsumoto, “Industry Questions about Open Source Software in Business: Research Directions and Potential Answers,” in Empirical Software Engineering in Practice (IWESEP), 2014 6th International Workshop on, 2014, pp. 55–59.
• [3] D. Naparat, P. Finnegan, and M. Cahalane, “Healthy Community and Healthy Commons: ‘Opensourcing’ as a Sustainable Model of Software Production,” Australasian Journal of Information Systems, vol. 19, no. 0, 2015.
• [4] N. Galanis, M. J. Casany, M. Alier, and E. Mayol, “Building a Community: The Moodbile Perspective,” in Computer Software and Applications Conference Workshops (COMPSACW), 2014 IEEE 38th International, 2014, pp. 211–216.
• [5] K. Fogel, Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project. http://producingoss.com/.
• [6] B. Fitzgerald, “The Transformation of Open Source Software,” MIS Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 587–598, 2006.
• [7] Z. Alshaikh, M. Alsaleh, A. Alarifi, and M. Zarour, “Toward a national strategy for Open Source Software,” in Standardization and Innovation in Information Technology (SIIT), 2013 8th International Conference on, 2013, pp. 1–12.