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". 

Body of Knowledge: Information Archive

One critical thing to get right in a documentation project is the Information Architecture. That is, are the pieces of information well organized and logically connected? This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot for the Open Source Body of Knowledge over the past few weeks. To that end, I’ve created this diagram:

Here, we see that Individuals perform Roles. Those roles exist to meet regulations or manage risks. And in order to do those things, the people performing those roles will need to undertake activities and take measurements. In order to perform these activities, people often need training materials (such as courses, that the Linux Foundation provides) and as a result of doing that work, they may create artifacts. An artifact might be a report (for example, a list of the open source packages being used in a project or across an enterprise) or it might be something like an open source strategy document.   

What activities you perform (and what measurements you make) are going to determine the maturity of your open source process. An activity like license compliance exists at the lower end of open source maturity, whereas maintaining open source projects for the strategic benefit of an organization sits at the higher end of the maturity model. 

And as we’ve written about before in this blog series, we’re trying to get to the point where we can certify individuals and organizations to say which level of maturity they’re performing at.

This is a big picture and there are lots of details to fill in, but this is happening! In the last week:

1. The OSR SIG have workshopped what the different maturity levels mean for individual developers. See more details in this GitHub issue.
2. I’ve written a GiHub PR on License Compliance Management which I’d like to see some reviews on!
3. We’ve upgraded to Docusaurus v2 on the OSR Site, so that we can better capture the linkages between concepts.
4. And Peter Smulovics has updated the about page to give details of the new OSR SIG Leads.

More updates next week!

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.