OSPO BoF - Strategy Discussion - Common Questions

[tomkivlin]

Common Questions:

• Does anyone have any good business objectives around revenue (loss prevention, generation, etc.) that they can share?
  • For revenue generation, the metrics are quite clear about interest in the project, etc.
  • Fear-based can be effective, but depends on the organisation - e.g. invest $n to reduce/remove the risk of being sued for $100n.
  • Open source contributor index
  • TODO survey about perception of how open source a company is
• Is your strategy only about contributions to open source, or also consumption, inner source, creation as well?
  • Linked to maturity of teams/orgs
  • Perhaps focusing on consumption and contributing to existing projects first is a stepping stone to increase maturity of interacting with open source, before going to the state of creating new open source projects. It gets good practices embedded.
  • Contributions as a team - not relying on any single person (e.g. asenior engineer) for owning/maintaining a project.
• Do you have a written down OSPO Strategy?
• If you have a written down OSPO Strategy, does it help consistency across how teams interact with open source projects/communities? (e.g. some teams might lead and commit to upstream projects, some teams might be much more aloof.)
• How to convince the board about the OSPO Strategy?
  • Ability to hire top talent was a key item. e.g. look to hire and retain key project maintainers.
• Are OSPOs generally hard line management structures, or virtual "Centre of Expertise" style virtual structures?
• How did you align OSPO goals/objectives with overall business goals?
• How to improve awareness and knowledge, and to build "good practice" around how to interact suitably with open source projects - discussing ideas/fixes before pull requests, smaller diffs, etc. etc.
• How do you explain that we are an open source company (e.g. revenue funds development of the open source project - partly - plus support, SLAs, etc. etc.), without seeming to conflict / compete with the open source project?
• Should we open source our documentation? Some good examples available.
• How can we translate the value of open source communities to people / management who don't understand it?
• How to articulate the "altruistic" part of funding open source communities and foundations without it just being "it's the right and kind thing to do"?
  • e.g. Kubernetes underpins our core business, therefore we want a healthy community in order to reduce the risk to the business, etc.