Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) have become vital to companies and their open source ecosystem, but getting the right information and a way to report OSPO activities is still unclear for many practitioners. Today’s post explains how Cauldron Cloud can be used as a reporting tool for three OSPO responsibilities: advocacy, community management and support.
How could Cauldron Cloud solve OSPO managers pain points?
According to TODO group, the main OSPO responsibilities are related with:
- Communicating the open source strategy within and outside the company
- Owning and overseeing the execution of the strategy
- Facilitating the effective use of open source in commercial products and services
- Ensuring high-quality and frequent releases of code to open source communities
- Engaging with developer communities and seeing that the company contributes back to other projects effectively
- Fostering an open source culture within an organization
In other words, managing an OSPO is a work that, at some point, deals with advocacy, community management and support success.
Reporting advocacy and community management
Advocacy is highly related with how we spread the word and effectively communicate OSPO actions within the community and organization. On the other hand, Community management can relate to how we communicate the health of the community, and how the different campaigns impacted the communities.
Overall speaking, having a way to communicate and share those insights are important assets to have in both scenarios. Cauldron Cloud provides an easy reporting system about the external/ internal contributors engagement of the different projects analyzed, including:
- Core, casual regular contributor’s growth
- Activity trends
- Developer champions based on the kind of activity performed
As well as project development status
- Time spent within the process
- Time to close issues
- Time to merge code contributions
- Questions solved and discussions on Stack Overflow, or other dedicated Stack Exchange platforms
You can also compare multiple projects, and find which ones are the most profitable ones, based on your company’s goals.
Reporting support success
Are communities answering to issues? How fast are they providing answers? How frequently does the community make releases? Where are most of the bottlenecks faced during the whole development process (from idea to production)?
Time taken to perform the different actions involved in software development processes is an important factor within support, that can be easily tracked in Cauldron Cloud.
Closing thoughts
Cauldron Cloud offers a refreshing solution to those managers willing to understand the software development projects that matter to them.
We also want to highlight that both Cauldron and Cauldron Cloud are 100% open source, since we believe in the paradigm and value of community. Contributors and feedback are always welcome.
We are launching Cauldron Cloud with a special pricing for early adopters.
Go for it and level-up your open source project management skills to the next level with data-driven decisions: cloud.cauldron.io
