About
The Open Contributions Project is an effort to describe and quantify corporate contributions to open source. Our goal is to empower employees advocating for open source contributions to their employers. đź’™
Project Goals
We plan on tackling two project focuses, in order of complexity:
- Explaining: writing convincing, data-backed resources for why open source contributions are in company’s best interests.
- Quantifying: creating a tracking service that spotlights open source contributions already being done by companies.
Explaining Open Source Contributions
We know that donating money and time to open source is the correct and right thing for companies to do. But financial decision-makers act only when motivated to. They need real reasons -ideally metrics- and/or research-based- that demonstrate why potential investments will be net positive for the company.
Documentation
Our project will start by creating a documentation website explaining:
- What open source is, for both non-technical and technical individuals
- Why contributing is beneficial to both the company and their industry
- How can companies contribute: employee time, free services, and/or monetary
We will also create “explainer” documents tailored to:
- Financial leaders (e.g. CFOs)
- Operations leaders (e.g. COOs)
- Technical leaders (e.g. CTOs)
Research
Advocating for a cause to an organization necessitates being able to prove why the cause is worthwhile. This often comes via a combination of two forms:
- Anecdotal: Real-world stories of how taking on the cause has benefitted organizations
- Data: Showing quantifiable results that seem to reinforce the cause being beneficial
Anecdotally, we have found data-informed approaches to be much more effective in convincing financial decision-makers.
Quantifying Corporate Open Source Contributions
Once our documentation and explainer pages are filled out on the site, we will expand our scope to becoming a public record of positive open source contributions by companies.
We intend to track two kinds of contributions:
- Employee time: During work hours, spending employee time on open source projects
- Financial: Monetary donations, including sponsorship donations and product discounts
Contributions will also be tracked in the context of what kind of recipient open source project:
- Community: Projects whose maintainers operate independently of a sole backing company
- Maintenance: Projects whose maintainers answer to and work for a company
We plan on creating open source data initially tracking the larger open source contributions of companies such as Facebook, Github, and Sentry. It is will be positioned as a crowdsourced repository similar to DefinitelyTyped or Wikipedia.
We will also investigate augmenting site data automatically when possible, such as with public financial records and APIs for services such as Tidelift.