This past year has been full of challenges and opportunities. TODO Group pursued its mission of helping Open Source Program Office adoption, education, and success within organizations across sectors and regions. The project launched many exciting new initiatives, refined existing ones, and received contributions from open source leaders and OSPO practitioners worldwide.
In this post, the TODO Group would like to appreciate and highlight some of the achievements and contributions done in 2022 by its community.
🧩 About TODO 2022 Strategic Goals
Every year, the TODO Steering Committee members gather together to define the TODO Strategic Goals for the upcoming year. Requests and feedback submitted by the community are taken into consideration when defining these goals. The community can share via the yearly TODO Satisfaction survey, OSPO forum community proposals, or community virtual calls.
In 2022, our strategic goals were:
- Make it easier to produce high-quality TODO group guides and other OSPO resources
- Host 8 OSPOlogy sessions (Webinars - OSPO Use Cases)
- Encourage more active participation in OSPOlogy
- Cultivate relationships with other communities
- Run Community Satisfaction Survey to get feedback, >80% satisfaction
- Improve and refresh TODO Website
- Increase geographical availability
- Assess TODO tooling (Slack, Mailing Lists, GitHub)
✅ Our Achievements
Make it easier to produce high-quality guides and other related OSPO resources
Created specific contribution guidelines to help the community propose, start or contribute to existing resources (Guides, whitepapers, OSPOlogy presentation, OSPO local group, etc). Now, the community can follow a homogeneous process via the OSPOlogy GitHub Discussions under Community Proposals. Examples can be found here.
Improved the Working Hours virtual calls and encourage people to join existing work-in-progress initiatives such as the Outbound OSS Guide or the Employee Open Source Engagement Guide.
Launched the OSPOlogy Live events in Europe, co-organized with other open source communities to identify OSPO adoption problems in Europe, and work on improving existing (or building new) resources from these communities that can help overcome such challenges and ease such adoption based on specific region needs.
Host 8 OSPOlogy sessions (Webinars - OSPO Use Cases)
OSPOlogy webinars share OSPO Use Cases from real organizations sharing their best practices, problems faced, journeys, or even useful tooling and resources for OSPOs. We are proud to share that TODO successfully achieved this goal with exciting topics and discussions across the year:
- Measuring the Business Impact of Open Source & OSPOs - Google
- Building an OSPO in the Energy Sector - Alliander
- How Academic OSPOs Are Amplifying Research Impact - UC Santa Cruz
- 3rd Party Outbound OSPO - Aiven
- The Strategies and Ideas Behind Spotify FOSS Fund - Spotify
- Growing an Open Source Culture Inside Sony - Sony
- Ways to Define a Metrics Strategy in your Open Source Program Office - RIT, VMware, CHAOSS
- How to automate your FOSS policy and processes - EPAM
Encourage more active participation in OSPOlogy (Repo)
From OSPO resources like the OSPO Mind Map, OSPO Maturity Model, to global and regional OSPO meetings; OSPOlogy hosts the study and open community communication to discuss the status of open source program offices across regions.
- We worked on improving the README file and the OSPOlogy Repo Governance to clarify the contribution path for OSPO practitioners willing to become part of the OSPOlogy community and contribute to TODO resources.
- We created an onboarding guide for the OSPOlogy community and share it on the TODO Community page.
As a result, the project hit 100 stars in less than a year and welcome 30+ new core contributors. Can’t wait to see how this community evolves in the upcoming years!
Cultivate relationships with other communities
This was an ongoing process that we started in 2021, and kept refining in 2022. Since the launch of OSPO Associates program, we continued looking for new ways to collaborate with other open source communities willing to help the OSPO movement with specific resources, knowledge, or working groups. Some examples from this cross-community collaboration that happened this year were:
- TODO and CHAOSS OSPO Metrics Working Group: The OSPO Metrics working group aims to advance how organizations understand the value that open source projects can provide as well as the value of these programs / initiatives.
- OSPOlogy Live Workshop in Europe: A collaborative effort to help organizations in Europe to build and advance in their OSPO journey, co-organized with OpenChain (open source compliance standards), TODO (OSPO management), InnerSource Commons (Internal open source culture), OpenSSF (security), CHAOSS (metrics and reporting), SPDX (SBoM Standart) and LF Energy (Open source in the energy sector).
TODO also started to collaborate closely with existing OSPO local subgroups within other open source communities such as the OSPO SIG at OpenChain Japan WG (Japanese Language) or the OSPO SIG at LF APAC (Chinese Language).
Increase geographical availability
One essential milestone we achieved this year was increasing geographical availability. TODO allocated regional virtual calls within OSPOlogy that covered different timezones:
- OSPOlogy Europe Sync Calls
- OSPOlogy APAC Sync Calls
- Working Hours AMER
- Working Hours EMEA & APAC
Another interesting initiative created in 2022 was the OSPOlogy Live Europe (previously introduced) and the OSPO Local Meetups to improve diversity and inclusion within non-native English speaking countries and thus support OSPO adoption across different regions. Some examples of OSPO local Meetups created are:
- OSPO Local Meetup Geneva (WIP meetups and active slack channel)
- OSPO Local Meetup Helsinki (active meetups and slack channel)
- OSPO Local Meetup Netherlands (active slack channel)
Run Community Satisfaction Survey to get feedback, >80% satisfaction
This year we received the highest number of answers in TODO history. 52 OSPOers completed the survey and gave great feedback on ways to improve our community. Thank you! According to the answers:
- Almost 90% of respondents showed overall satisfaction with TODO in 2022 (total percentage of people who ranked 4 “very satisfied” or 5 “extremely satisfied”)
- 97% of respondents were likely to recommend TODO in 2022 (total percentage of people who ranked 4 “likely to recommend” or 5 ”very likely to recommend”)
📌 Keep working on
Improve and refresh TODO Website
Something that we started working on but couldn’t finish within the deadline due to some project blockers. So far, we added new pages to the current design such as the TODO Code Of Conduct, the Community Page, or the OSPO Associates as well as have a specific section to presenting the new OSPO resources (studies, whitepapers, training courses, etc). Our next goal in 2023 would probably be to make some changes to the current design to be able to implement the todogorup.org new wireframe.
Assess TODO tooling (Slack, Mailing Lists, GitHub)
Auditing existing TODO tooling is the only strategic goal we couldn’t start in 2022. We hope to retake this goal early in 2023.
Final thoughts
We are very thankful to the worldwide open source community, who came together to contribute their efforts and time by sharing open source best practices and creating Open Source Program Offices resources that anyone can freely use and contribute to.
We look forward to working and collaborating with everyone in the years to come. We would like to wish you a peaceful holiday season. Hope you enjoy time with your loved ones and have a relaxed start to the new year.