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5 key insights for open source project sustainability in 2022 Sean P. Goggins Tue, 03/29/2022 - 03:00 Up 2 readers like this

Many technology firms are turning to open source tools to accelerate innovation and growth. As these firms work to influence open source projects, governance practices sometimes shift from coordination among a small group of developers and firms to management by large communities of contributors and organizations, often with competing priorities.

Sustainable projects require sustainable communities. Adapting to a larger, more competitive open source landscape requires organizations to invest in community building. This demands a view of source-code availability that's inextricably connected to the social engagements of contributors and organizations in open source projects. Many organizations now consider open source community engagement as both a social and a technical—or "sociotechnical"—investment.

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The CHAOSS project seeks to improve the transparency and actionability of open source projects and community health. CHAOSS has identified and defined metrics that meaningfully assess open source community health.

Some CHAOSS metrics provide indicators of a wide range of social factors now essential for understanding the shape of sustainable open source communities. Social metrics require more sophisticated collection and interpretation strategies, such as machine learning, as well as techniques like surveys and the specification of proven practices for attracting and retaining new contributors. Analyzing the social dimension of open source projects focuses on understanding the dynamics of human relations and communities.

The insights into open source community health below result from approximately 36 interviews with corporate open source participants. The names of interview subjects quoted here have been withheld to protect their privacy.

Community building

Corporate open source participants must recognize that community building is central to sustaining open source projects. Answers to such questions as "Is the community welcoming?" and "Whose voices are heard?" are important considerations when building and joining communities:

One thing we definitely look for before we're going to engage [in an open source project] is what's the vibe here? And that's often a very social thing. Do they seem to enforce the code of conduct? Are there people in this community that seem abusive … in various ways?

Community activity

Most project contributors recognize the growing significance of community as part of successful open source projects. They want active communities that continue to advance the project's goals in ways that support all members and reflect the variety of opinions found in community work. They want members that are nice to see and work with regularly. Frequent and positive engagement is becoming so important that a lack of activity or proliferation of toxic interactions are common reasons people exit a community. In fact, it can even be more important than any technical support the community provides:

I worked with the [project] board for a while, and it is such an active one. Unfortunately, there's just a lot of derogatory terms used. The thing about open source, it's all usually text-based, [and] that can be harmful. We'll pull people away from contributing if they don't feel comfortable. I've seen people leave different communities based on how things were handled. I think that the [worst] I've seen is basically just derogatory terms, not necessarily based on race, religion, or gender, just somebody angrily lashing out based on the code they don't want to see or do want to see.

Diversity and inclusion

Equally important is how the community addresses diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Potential contributors ask themselves questions such as, "How will I be treated?" and "How will I treat others?" People understand attention to DEI (or lack thereof) as a critical part of project risk and sustainability. Failure of a community to center DEI in the sociotechnical work of a project influences contributors' decision to join or leave an open source community, regardless of what a community may provide technically:

The moment you see any bullying, like racism, bigotry, or anything that looks like excluding others from the conversation—if that gets called out and dealt with, I mean, it's not great that it happened, but either the person took the feedback and improved their behavior, or they were told to leave. [Either is a good outcome.] But if you see that stuff's happening and no one's doing anything about it, and everybody is just sitting on their hands and waiting for somebody else to do something about it, that's problematic. I don't have time for that. That would cause me to leave.

Community culture

The importance of nurturing a sense of community in open source connects closely to contributor expectations of a welcoming environment for people from diverse backgrounds. In response to these considerations, open source projects must constantly reflect on how to signal that the community is healthy, build trust among community members, and lower barriers to community participation in the interest of their own sustainability.

The way an open source community responds to issues is a very strong indicator as to their balance between [being] receptive to feedback and not receptive to direct contamination. I think that a successful open source project is a balance between the confidence that your code can be scrutinized by others and the humility that random people you don't know can improve your code. That balance between confidence and humility is reflected in the way people respond to issues. So that's what I look for.

Healthy competition

The pressures to align corporate interests with project interests can result in oversteering. A business trying to exert a degree of control that undermines a sense of community is harmful to a project and its maintainers. Creating a healthy community requires a balance of corporate control through paid contributions alongside thoughtful community building.

[One large open source company, for example,] has resources assigned to the project that are being driven by their own internal teams, and their priorities are very much not in our control. Collaborating in that situation is not as attractive as finding a way to do our own thing.

Building sustainability means building community

A technical open source asset's significance and quality depend on a mutually respectful social system, and that is a new reality for most corporate open source participants. Effective corporate engagement with open source projects demands attention to a set of paradoxes. To be competitive, a firm needs to contribute to a set of open source projects they don't control, and competitors are working side by side in these projects. To create a communal environment where a project becomes and remains sustainable, participants must set aside their competitive instincts and foster trust. A rising tide of both social and technical concerns floats all boats.

Open source software's role in creating value for technology firms continues to grow because sharing the costs of creating and sustaining core infrastructure is not only attractive but arguably a requirement for doing business. Sustaining these critical technology assets demands such a high number of talented contributors that forming and nurturing communities around open source software is vital.

Healthy open source communities engender a sense of purpose and belonging for their contributors, so that people continue to want to participate or join. Such communities are made of real and diverse people, with their own interests, concerns, and lives. Open source contributors—whether individual or corporate—must build real communities with participants who are interested in each other as well as the project. That requires a thoughtful, attentive, and often retrospective focus on how we build and manage our open source communities.

We would like to thank Red Hat for its generous support of this work.

[ Explore why companies are choosing open source: Red Hat's State of Enterprise Open Source Report ]

New research unveils how corporate open source participation has brought renewed attention to community health.

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Matt Germonprez is the Mutual of Omaha Associate Professor of Information Systems in the College of Information Science & Technology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He uses qualitative field-studies to research corporate engagement with open communities and the dynamics of design in these engagements. His lines of research have been funded by numerous organizations including the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Mozilla. Matt is the co-founder of the Association for Information Systems SIGOPEN and the Linux Foundation Community Health Analytics OSS Project (CHAOSS). He and has had work accepted at ISR, MISQ, JAIS, JIT, ISJ, I&O, CSCW, OpenSym, Group, HICSS, and ACM Interactions. Matt is an active open source community member, having presented design and development work at LinuxCon, the Open Source Summit North America, the Linux Foundation Open Compliance Summit, the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, and the Open Source Leadership Summit.

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Elizabeth Barron is the Community Manager for CHAOSS and is a long time open source contributor and advocate with over 20 years experience at companies like GitHub, Pivotal/VMWare Tanzu, and Sourceforge. She is also an author, public speaker, event organizer, and award winning nature photographer. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

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Kevin Lumbard is a doctoral candidate at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and a CHAOSS project maintainer. His research explores corporate engagement with open source and the design of open source critical digital infrastructure.

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Brian Proffitt is Manager, Community Insights within Red Hat's Open Source Program Office, focusing on content generation, community metrics, and special projects. Brian's experience with community management includes knowledge of community onboarding, community health, and business alignment. Prior to joining Red Hat in 2014, he was a technology journalist with a focus on Linux and open source, and the author of 22 consumer technology books.

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For the second summer, Major League Hacking (MLH) is running the Production Engineering Track of the MLH Fellowship, powered by Meta. This 12-week educational program is 100% remote and uses industry-leading curriculum from Linux Foundation Training & Certification.  The program is hands-on, project-based, and teaches students how to become Production Engineers.  The goal of the program is for all participants to land a job or internship in the Site Reliability Engineering space, and it will be opened to 100 active college students who meet our admissions criteria.

This Summer’s program will start on May 31, 2022 and will end on August 19, 2022.

Applications are now open and will close on May 23, 2022!

Apply Now!

What is Production Engineering?

Production Engineering, also known as Site Reliability Engineering and DevOps, is one of the most in-demand skill sets that leading technology companies are hiring for. However, it is not widely available as a class offering in university settings.

At Meta, Production Engineers (PEs) are a hybrid between software and systems engineers and are core to engineering efforts that keep Meta platforms running and scaling. PEs work within Meta’s product and infrastructure teams to make sure products and services are reliable and scalable; this means, writing code and debugging hard problems in production systems across Meta services – like Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus – and backend services like Storage, Cache, and Network.

What is the Production Engineering Track of the MLH Fellowship?

Launched in the summer of 2020, the MLH Fellowship first focused on Open Source Software projects, pairing early career software engineers with projects and engineers from widely-used open source codebases (like AWS, GitHub, and Solana Labs). During the program, Fellows learned important concepts and software practices while contributing production-level code to their projects and showcasing those contributions in their portfolio. Through the Fellowship, 700 global alumni have learned Open Source skills and tools and increased their professional networks in the process.

The Production Engineering Track takes this proven fellowship model and expands on it. As part of the Production Engineering Track, fellows are put in groups of 10 (“Pods”), matched to dedicated mentors from Meta Engineering while they work through projects and curriculum, and receive guidance from Meta’s Talent Acquisition team, too. Successful program graduates will be invited to apply to full-time Meta internships.

What will admitted fellows learn in the Production Engineering Track?

Program participants will gain practical skills from educational content – adopted by the MLH Curriculum Team – licensed from the Linux Foundation’s “Essentials of System Administration” course. The program covers how to administer, configure and upgrade Linux systems, along with the tools and concepts necessary to build and manage a production Linux infrastructure. The complete list of topics covered in the program includes:

• Linux Fundamentals
• Scripting
• Databases
• Services
• Testing
• Containers
• CI/CD
• Monitoring
• Networking
• Troubleshooting
• Interview skills

By pairing this industry-leading curriculum with hands-on, project-based learning – and engineering mentors from Meta – fellows in the Production Engineering Track greatly build on their programming knowledge. Fellows will learn a broader array of technology skills, opening the door to new career options in SRE.

What are the important dates I should know about?

The program will be available to roughly 100 aspiring software engineers and will start on May 31, 2022 and end on August 19, 2022.

Applications are now open and will close on May 23, 2022!

Will I get paid as part of the program?

Each successful participant will earn an educational stipend adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity for the country they’re located in.

Who is eligible?

Eligible students are:

• Rising sophomores or juniors enrolled in a 4 year degree granting program
• United States, Mexico, or Canada-based
• Able to code in at least one language (preferably Python)
• Can dedicate at least 30 hours/week for the 12-weeks of the program

MLH invites and encourages people to apply who identify as women or non-binary. MLH also invites and encourages people to apply who identify as Black/African American or LatinX. In partnership with Meta, MLH is committed to building a more diverse and inclusive tech industry and providing learning opportunities to under-represented technologists.

Apply Now!

This article was originally posted at Major League Hacking.

The post MLH Fellowship Opens Applications for this Summer’s Production Engineering Track appeared first on Linux Foundation.

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