This year at FINOS we are focusing on one of FINOS' key existing projects: Open Source Readiness. This is FINOS' term for helping the finance industry "do open source properly". 

Yes, it’s the Open Source Readiness weekly blog again and I’m still on holiday, so you’ll have to put up with some weeks-old news until I come back next week.  

Metrics

So, let’s talk about metrics (we have a PR in the works expanding on this). How would you measure the success of open source within your organization?

You could look at the number of committers or GitHub Stars, maybe? That would give you some indication of the “impact” your firm is having with its open source projects. This would be an interesting external measure.

Alternatively, you could try and measure internal code duplication. Having internal forks of open source projects is generally a bad idea, as it means someone (often many people) has to maintain those forks - but they usually exist because staff can’t contribute the functionality they need to the upstream project. So measuring how few internal forks you have would be a good internal measure of whether you’re benefiting from open source.

Another good internal measure might be contribution strength - the number of staff committing to open source projects, pull requests getting merged and so on.  

A good measure of how mature your open source processes are might be to look at how long it takes to go from someone having an issue to pushing a fix. If your firm has a long approval chain for new project contributions, this could be holding you back from getting more open source done.  

What does your OSPO do? Get in touch and let us know! One way to do that would be to comment on the PR.  

Open Source Readiness SIG Meeting

Another way would be to join the SIG meeting on 2nd August, 3 PM GMT 10 AM EST.  

I’d love to tell you what’s on the agenda, but at this point, I have no idea. Since I’ll be on holiday surfing or something, James McLeod will be taking over FINOS SIG duties for me - just like old times. Thanks, James!

Our Mailing List

And did you know we have a mailing list? Simply drop an email to osr+subscribe@finos.org to join! Feel free to hit us up with any OSR-related questions or topics that are on your mind. 

Usually, these will end up being agenda items in further SIG meetings or issues that we’ll log in GitHub.

… And Finally

Have you seen the Open Source Readiness Body of Knowledge recently?  

There is a ton of stuff to read on there now! The SIG group has been on fire producing materials lately, so check it out.  

This is a much better use of your pool-side reading list this summer than picking up “Spare” by Prince Harry or whatever it is this year that everyone is reading. 

See you next week!

Author: Rob Moffat

Interested in this FINOS open source project, or any of our other projects? Click the link below to see how to get involved in the FINOS Community.