Actively Manage Your Open Source Project Health with Insights

As a project leader, you’re constantly looking for ways to monitor the health of your community and nurture its growth. Our latest version of LFX insights will provide you with powerful new tools, dashboards, and metrics to understand your project’s performance and your community’s engagement at a glance. 

The new and improved LFX Insights will allow you to look at detailed technical contribution data, code velocity, and repository information. Dive into the numbers and see who is contributing, how much is being contributed, and how those metrics are changing from day to day. The updated Project Analytics and Observation dashboards will give community managers detailed access to their project communities, further enabling them to make recommendations on where the technical teams need to refocus or prioritize. 

Keeping track of contributor strength, consistency and growth are a fundamental part of maintaining a healthy, growing project community. Here are three ways LFX Insights will help you do just that:

Understand your Contributor Strength

LFX contributor strength metrics will show you the amount of project contributions, the amount of individual contributions, how individual contributors compare against each other, and who is contributing less–or more–than usual. 

To understand your contributor strength, you need to know how many contributions are being made over time. You need to know the number of individual contributors, and how that is changing. You should also be looking at your top contributors to see how their contributions ebb and flow over time. If all of these metrics show consistent growth, then you have a healthy contributor strength. If your metrics for any of the above are stagnant or declining, then it’s time to take action.

As a Community Manager, you will want to determine if any contributors are struggling or drifting away. If so, it could be a sign that you need to attract new contributors or make an effort to re-engage your community.

Is your project overly reliant on a small number of contributors in a way that could put your project at risk? It’s time to take action to expand your pool of contributors.


Project Diversity and Community Health

The most successful projects take pride in cultivating a diverse community. The Contribution Affiliation metrics monitor contributors at the organizational level, providing powerful insight into how contributions from organizations–and their employees–compare.

Organization Leaderboards tell us who are the most active member organizations and the contribution mix of new and existing organizations.         



Learn how many of your contributors are engaged in multiple projects and how much influence they have across the open source ecosystem.

The bread and butter of managing project performance is monitoring code velocity. This means looking at pull request efficiency, commits by repository, cycle times, documentation, and sign-offs. A consistent and growing code velocity means your project is on the right track.

In this example, an average of 84 PRs were merged in the last year, the total number of PRs submitted declined by 22% in the past year, and 24.54% of total changes were merged without any approval during the past year.


Pull Request pipeline and resolution 

The total code changes submitted were 1.302, with 861 of those reviewed and 808 accepted.  The PR cycle time averaged five days of waiting in review, seven days in the review cycle, and approval in 4 days.  From this information, we can gauge the quality of the contributions and assess if the project goals are kept on target. 

The PR cycle time can help project leaders detect if the approved committers assigned to a specific component are enough to keep the reviews rolling. Ideally, a project wants a quick turnaround of reviews and feedback to drive feature development and issue resolution to completion on an optimal timeline.


Issue Pipeline

These metrics demonstrate a project that is highly engaged and well-balanced. The number of issues resolved decreased by 42.24%, and the number of issues submitted decreased by 19.27% during the past year.


If you see new contributors jumping into the fray, that’s great news. New contributors playing a role in issue creation and resolution can reflect on the level of interest in the project and how the open source community perceives it. Project managers can see the impact of their releases from the perspective of new users and have a fresh take on how the project impacts the community.

Overall, the latest edition of LFX Insights will provide you with a rich set of tools, metrics, and dashboards to monitor the health of your project community. As you familiarize yourself with Insights, we’d like to hear what you want next. This tool, after all, was specifically made for project leaders like you.

Check out the latest Insights features at https://insights.lfx.dev

Read more about the new features and ask questions in the LFX Community Forum at https://community.lfx.dev/. 

Would you like to contribute to a project via LFX? Create an account at https://openprofile.dev/.

LFX is available exclusively to Linux Foundation projects. Learn how to host your project at the Linux Foundation by visiting  https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects/hosting.

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Elevate Your Organizations Open Source Strategy

The role of software, specifically open source software, is more influential than ever and drives today’s innovation. Maintaining and growing future innovation depends on the open source community. Enterprises that understand this are driving transformation and rising to the challenges by boosting their collaboration across industries, understanding how to support their open source developers, and contributing to the open source community.

They realize that success depends on a cohesive, dedicated, and passionate open source community, from hundreds to thousands of individuals. Their collaboration is key to achieving the project’s goals.   It can be challenging to manage all aspects of an open source project considering all the different parts that drive it. For example:

  • Project’s scope and goals
  • Participating members, maintainers, and collaborators
  • Management and governance
  • Legal guidelines and procedures
  • IT services 
  • Source control, CI/CD, distribution, and cloud providers
  • Communication channels and social media

The Linux Foundation’s LFX provides various tools to help open source communities design and adopt a successful project strategy considering all moving parts. So how do they do it? Let’s explore that using the Hyperledger project as an example. 

1. Understand your project’s participation

Through the LFX Individual Dashboard, participants can register the identity they are using to contribute their code to GitHub and Gerrit (Since the Hyperledger project uses both). Then, the tool uses that identity to connect users’ contributions, affiliations, memberships, training, certifications, earned badges, and general information. 

With this information, other LFX tools gather and propagate data charts to help the community visualize their participation in GitHub and Gerrit for the different Hyperledger repositories. It also displays detailed contribution metrics, code participation, and issue participation.  

The LFX Organization Dashboard is a convenient tool to help managers and organizations manage their project memberships, discover similar projects to join, and understand the team’s engagement in the community. In detail, it provides information on:

  • Code contributions
  • Committee members
  • Event speakers and attendees 
  • Training and certification
  • Project enrollments

It is vital to have the project’s members and participant identities organized to understand better how their work makes a difference in the project and how their participation interacts with others toward the project’s goals.  

2. Manage your project’s processes

LFX Project Control Center offers a one-stop portal for program managers to organize their project participation, IT services, and quick access to other LFX tools.

Project managers can also connect:

  • Their project’s source control
  • Issue tracking tool
  • Distribution service
  • Cloud provider
  • Mail lists
  • Meeting management
  • Wiki and hosted domains 

For example, Hyperledger can view all related organizations under their Hyperledger Foundation umbrella, analyze each participant project, and connect services like GitHub, Jira, Confluence, and their communication channels like Groups.io and Twitter accounts.

Managing all the project’s aspects in one place makes it easier for managers to visualize their project scope and better understand how all their services impact the project’s performance.

3. Reach outside and get your project in the spotlight

Social and earned media are vital to ensure your project reaches the ears of its consumers. In addition, it is essential to have good visibility into your project’s influence in the Open Source world and where it is making the best impact.

LFX’s Insights Social Media Metrics provides high-level metrics on a project’s social media account like:

  • Twitter followers and the following information 
  • Tweets and retweet breakdown
  • Trending tweets
  • Hashtag breakdown 
  • Contributor and user mentions

In the case of Hyperledger, we have an overall view of their tweet and retweet breakdown. In addition, we can also see how tweets by Bitcoin News are making an impression on interested communities. 

Insights help you analyze how your project impacts other regions, reaches diverse audiences by language, and adjust communication and marketing strategies to reach out to the sources that open source participants rely on to get the latest information on how the community contributes and engages with others. For example, tweets written in English, Japanese, and Spanish made by Hyperledger contributors are visible in an overall languages chart with direct and indirect impressions calculated.

The bottom line

A coherent open source project strategy is a crucial driver of how enterprises manage their open source programs across their organization and industry. LFX is one of the tools that make enterprise open source programs successful. It is an exclusive benefit for Linux Foundation members and projects. If your organization and project would like to join us, learn more about membership or hosting your project.

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LFX’22 Mentorship Experience with Open Horizon

The following post originally appeared on Medium. The author, Ruchi Pakhle, participated in our LFX Mentorship program this past spring.

echo “amazing experience”

Hey everyone!
I am Ruchi Pakhle currently pursuing my Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering from MGM’s College of Engineering & Technology. I am a passionate developer and an open-source enthusiast. I recently graduated from LFX Mentorship Program. In this blog post, I will share my experience of contributing to Open Horizon, a platform for deploying container-based workloads and related machine learning models to compute nodes/clusters on edge.

Background

I have been an active contributor to open-source projects via different programs like GirlScript Summer of Code, Script Winter of Code & so on.. through these programs I contributed to different beginner-level open-source projects. After almost doing this for a year, I contributed to different organizations for different projects including documentation and code. On a very random morning applications for LFX were opened up and I saw various posts on LinkedIn among that posts one post was of my very dear friend Unnati Chhabra, she had just graduated from the program and hence I went ahead and checked the organization that was a fit as per my skill set and decided to give it a shot.

Why did I apply to Open Horizon?

I was very interested in DevOps and Cloud Native technologies and I wanted to get started with them but have been procrastinating a lot and did not know how to pave my path ahead. I was constantly looking for opportunities that I can get my hands on. And as Open Horizon works exactly on DevOps and Cloud Native technologies, I straight away applied to their project and they had two slots open for the spring cohort. I joined their element channel and started becoming active by contributing to the project, engaging with the community, and also started to read more about the architecture and tried to understand it well by referring to their youtube videos. You can contribute to Open Horizon here.

Application process

Linux Foundation opens LFX mentorship applications thrice a year: one in spring, one in summer, and the winter cohort, each cohort being for a span of 3 months. I applied to the winter cohort for which the applications opened up around February 2022 and I submitted my application on 4th February 2022 for the Open Horizon Project. I remember there were three documents mandatory for submitting the application:

1. Updated Resume/CV

2. Cover Letter

(this is very very important in terms of your selection so cover everything in your cover letter and maybe add links to your projects, achievements, or wherever you think they can add great value)

The cover letter should cover these points primarily

  • How did you find out about our mentorship program?
  • Why are you interested in this program?
  • What experience and knowledge/skills do you have that are applicable to this program?
  • What do you hope to get out of this mentorship experience?

3. A permission document from your university stating they have no obligation over the entire span of the mentorship was also required (this depends on org to org and may not be asked as well)

Selection Mail

The LFX acceptance mail was a major achievement for me as at that period of time I was constantly getting rejections and I had absolutely no idea about how things were gonna work out for me. I was constantly doubting myself and hence this mail not only boosted my confidence but also gave me a ray of hope of achieving things by working hard towards it consistently. A major thanks to my mentor, Joe Pearson, and Troy Fine for believing in me and giving me this opportunity.

My Mentorship Journey

Starting off from the day I applied to the LFX until getting selected as an LFX Mentee and working successfully for over 3 months and a half, it felt surreal. I have been contributing to open-source projects and organizations before. But being a part of LFX gave me such a huge learning curve and a sense of credibility and ownership that I got here wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else.

I have been contributing to open-source projects and organizations before. But being a part of LFX gave me such a huge learning curve and a sense of credibility and ownership that I got here wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else.

I still remember setting up the mgmt-hub all-in-one script locally and I thought it was just a cakewalk, well it was not. I literally used to try every single day to run the script but somehow it would end up giving some errors, I used to google them and apply the results but still, it would fail. But one thing which I consistently did was share my progress regularly with my mentor, Troy no matter if the script used to fail but still I used to communicate that with Troy, I would send him logs and he used to give me some probable solutions for the same but still the script used to fail. I then messaged in the open-horizon-examples group and Joe used to help with my doubts, a huge thanks to him and Troy for helping me figure out things patiently. After over a month on April 1st, the script got successfully executed and then I started to work on the issues assigned by Troy.

These three months taught me to be consistent no matter what the circumstances are and work patiently which I wouldn’t have learned in my college. This experience would no doubt make me a better developer and engineer along with the best practices followed. A timeline of my journey has been shared here.

  1. Checkout my contributions here
  2. Checkout open-horizon-services repo

Concluding the program

The LFX Mentorship Program was a great great experience and I did get a great learning curve which I wouldn’t have gotten any other way. The program not only encourages developers to kick-start their open-source journey but also provides some great perks like networking, and learning from the best minds. I would like to thank my mentors Joe Pearson, Troy Fine, and Glen Darling because without their support and patience this wouldn’t have been possible. I would be forever grateful for this opportunity.

Special thanks to my mentor Troy for always being patient with me. These kind words would remain with me always although the program would have ended.

The LF Edge Mentorship program is always a great learning experience, and this year was no exception. Because of Ruchi’s work we now have more services following our best practice policies in the open-horizon-services github repository. Despite the time difference she was always flexible when it came to our sync-ups and was never afraid to ask questions or for clarification if something wasn’t clear. I hope Ruchi will continue to provide the meaningful contributions to the Open Horizon project I have seen her demonstrate throughout this mentorship program.

handwritten thank you note from joe pearson

And yes how can I forget to plug in the awesome swags, special thanks, and gratitude to my mentor Joe Pearson for sending me such cool swags and this super cool note 

If you have any queries, connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter and I would be happy to help you out!

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The Life Cycles of Open Source Projects

There are hundreds of thousands of open source projects out there – many are innovative ideas, poised to make a positive impact on the world. There is a much smaller number that move from an idea with one or two maintainers to broad adoption with an active community and investments from other organizations. How does this happen? What moves the needle? Helping projects grow and mature is exactly the mission of the Linux Foundation. We are a place where open source innovators thrive. 

In this article, I want to help you look at each of the project life cycle stages, determine where your project is, and, at a high-level, show how you can move your project successfully through each stage. 

What does success look like?

Open Source projects succeed when the right parties are involved throughout every stage of a project’s life cycle. Project teams work together from the early proposal and planning stages to the projects’ peak maturity stages and eventual wind-down.

This article is targeted to help Open Source Communities and Program Managers identify the life cycle stages of a project and promote the participation of the right committees at the right time to drive the project smoothly and transition it as it develops.

It also analyzes an example of what a project’s participation and challenges look like for an early-stage project compared to a mature project to bring insight into what to expect at those stages.

Open Source project life cycle

Depending on your Open Source project, these stages might vary in name, but most projects center on the same principles and focus on the following stages:

lifecycles of an open source project
  • The Proposal Stage Where a specific need is identified and planning preparations for resources and work is analyzed and presented to the technical steering committee (TSC) and Chair committees.
  • The Incubation Stage It starts when a proposal is approved, and the resources are assigned. This is one of the most critical stages in the project. Early development is underway, and it is essential to set the foundation of how the project will operate to avoid difficulties in the future.
  • The Mature Stage It happens when a project has made several successful releases and is on track with its vision. Challenges may still exist; however, given the planning during the early stages, they are manageable.
  • The Core Stage It is defined when a project has reached a broad audience due to its value. This is where teams need to focus on maintaining and keeping the pace steady.
  • Project Archived This stage can sometimes be challenging to identify, given the speed gained in the previous stages. It could be a good thing that a project has reached its goal and hence needs to be archived, or it can, unfortunately, happen due to unforeseen circumstances like a lack of resources to collaborate. For projects that have difficulty identifying this stage, I recommend the following article: Winding Down an Open Source Project.

Committee Participation

Let’s discuss how a project in its early Incubation stage compares to a project in a Mature set and how having the appropriate committee’s attention can facilitate the work.

  • Project during Incubation
  • Still in a fragile state, requirement changes can still occur.
    • Board and TSC to approve
    • Committers and Maintainers
  • High activity of contributions since this project can still be considered under the bring-up phase
    • Committers and Maintainers collaborate on content
  • Can still be at risk of achieving if resource availability and contributions decline
    • Board and TSC can take a decision
  • Project during Maturity
  • At this point, the project should be heading towards the next releases. If requirements change, it might be a sign of poor planning.
    • Committers and Maintainers collaborate on content
  • Core review happens after evaluating the state of the releases and the demand that they have created.
    • TSC to approve
  • Can still be at risk of achieving if resource availability and contributions decline!
    • Board and TSC can take a decision
project during incubation and project during maturity table

It is essential to have a clear definition of where your project stands and a clear roadmap to where it is heading so the key teams can perform their best during the project’s life cycle.

How does LFX play a part in the project’s life cycle?

LFX was developed by the Linux Foundation to streamline and support Open Source projects at any stage of a project’s life cycle. For example:

  • Individual Dashboard: This is where it all begins. Create your open source profile and affiliations to manage your project contributions to be credited for your contributions as the project progresses—a necessity for all developers at the Proposal and Incubation stages. 
  • Insights: Offers critical metrics on collaboration, issue tracking, and CI/CD status, which are vital tools to keep the pace of contributions and make more informed decisions early on. Great tool for the Incubation, Mature, and Core phases.
  • Security: Projects need license and vulnerability protection, and the Security tool helps projects scan their code and report any issues with options to get these fixed—a must-have during Incubation, Mature, and Core phases.
  • Organization Dashboard:  Provides complete visibility and activity for open source projects and all Linux Foundation services. A valuable tool for our Members/Organizations in the Proposal, Incubation, Mature, and Core phases.
  • Easy CLA: A tool to consider early on to have company and individual contributions protected and unblocked so collaborators and committers can participate as soon as possible. Great to have at the Proposal stage.   
  • Mentorship: At any stage, the Mentorship tool brings mentors experts based on the project and mentees interested to learn more about it to participate and start contributing. This tool is excellent to have available at any life cycle stage.

With the right participation from individuals and committees, the project will have the right resources to grow and develop through each life cycle stage.   I hope this article comes in handy for your open source community, and you find it easier to accurately identify your project’s life cycle stage – and have the right LFX tools to boost your project performance. All LFX tools play an essential part in the open source project’s development; this article hopefully helps your team choose where to start your LFX journey.

Check out the LFX tools and for additional information about project life cycles, please feel free to contact me, Jessica Gonzalez, at jwagantall@linuxfoundation.org and join your colleagues in the open source community at the LFX Community Forum. 

The author, Jessica Gonzalez, is Release Engineer & LFX Community Architect at the Linux Foundation.

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One Place to Manage Your Open Source Projects and Communities

Open source communities are driven by a mutual interest in collaboration and sharing around a common solution. They are filled with passion and energy. As a result, today’s world is powered by open source software, powering the Internet, databases, programming languages, and so much more. It is revolutionizing industries and tackling the toughest challenges. Just check out the projects fostered here at the Linux Foundation for a peek into what is possible. 

What is the challenge? 

As the communities and the projects they support grow and mature, active community engagement to recruit, mentor, and enable an active community is critical. Organizations are now recognizing this as they are more and more dependent on open source communities. Yet, while the ethos of open source is transparency and collaboration, the tool chain to automate, visualize, analyze, and manage open source software production remains scattered, siloed, and of varying quality.

How do we address these challenges?

And now, involvement and engagement in open source communities goes beyond software developers and extends to engineers, architects, documentation writers, designers, Open Source Program Office professionals, lawyers, and more. To help everyone stay coordinated and engaged, a centralized source of information about their activities, tooling to simplify and streamline information from multiple sources, and a solution to visualize and analyze key parameters and indicators is critical. It can help: 

  • Organizations wishing to better understand how to coordinate internal participation in open source and measure outcomes
  • CTOs and engineering leads looking to build a cohesive open source strategy 
  • Project maintainers needing to wrangle the legal and operational sides of the project
  • Individual keeping track of their open source impacts

Enter the Linux Foundation’s LFX Platform – LFX operationalizes this approach, providing tools built to facilitate every aspect of open source development and empowers projects to standardize, automate, analyze, and self-manage while preserving their choice of tools and development workflows in a vendor-neutral platform.

LFX tools do not disrupt a project’s existing toolchain but rather integrate a project’s community tools and ecosystem to provide a common control plane with APIs from numerous distributed data sources and operations tools. It also adds intelligence to drive outcome-driven KPIs and utilizes a best practices-driven, vendor-agnostic tools chain. It is the place to go for active community engagement and open source activity, enabling the already powerful open source movement to be even more successful.

How does it work? 

Much of the data and information that makes up the open source universe is, not surprisingly, open to see. For instance, GitHub and GitLab both offer APIs that allow third-parties to track all activity on open projects. Social media and public chat channels, blog posts, documentation, and conference talks are also easily captured. For projects hosted at a foundation, such as the Linux Foundation, there is an opportunity to aggregate the public and semi-private data into a privacy respecting, opt-in unified data layer. 

More specifically to an organization or project, LFX is modular, extensible, and API-driven. It is pluggable and can easily integrate the data sources and tools that are already in use by organizations rather than force them to change their work processes. For instance:

  • Source control software (e.g. Git, GitHub, or GitLab)
  • CI/CD platforms (e.g. Jenkins, CircleCI, Travis CI, and GitHub Actions)
  • Project management (e.g. Jira, GitHub Issues)
  • Registries  (e.g. Docker Hub)
  • Documentation  (e.g. Confluence Wiki)
  • Marketing automation (e.g. social media and blogging platforms)
  • Event management platforms (e.g. physical event attendance, speaking engagements, sponsorships, webinar attendance, and webinar presentations)

This holistic and configurable view of projects, organizations, foundations, and more make it much easier to understand what is happening in open source, from the most granular to the universal. 

What do real-world users think? 

Part of LFX is a community forum to ask questions, share solutions, and more. Recently, Jessica Wagantall shared about the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP). She notes:

ONAP is part of the LF Networking umbrella and consists of 30+ components working together towards the same goal since 2017. Since then, we have faced situations where we have to evaluate if the components are getting enough support during release schedules and if we are identifying our key contributors to the project.

In this time, we have learned a lot as we grow, and we have had the chance to have tools and resources that we can rely on every step of the way. One of these tools is LFX Insights.

We rely on LFX Insights tools to guide the internal decisions and keep the project growing and the contributions flowing.

LFX Insights has become a potent tool that gives us an overview of the project as well as statistics of where our project stands and the changes that we have encountered when we evaluate release content and contribution trends.

Read Jessica’s full post for some specific examples of how LFX Insights helps her and the whole team. 

John Mertic is a seasoned open source project manager. One of his jobs currently is helping to manage the Academy Software Foundation. John shares: 

The Academy Software Foundation was formed in 2018 in partnership with the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to provide a vendor-neutral home for open source software in the visual effects and motion picture industries.

A challenge this industry was having was that there were many key open source projects used in the industry, such as OpenVDB, OpenColorIO, and OpenEXR, that were cornerstones to production but lacked developers and resources to maintain them. These projects were predominantly single vendor owned and led, and my experience with other open source projects in other verticals and horizontal industries causes this situation, which leads to sustainability concerns, security issues, and lack of future development and innovation.

As the project hit its 3rd anniversary in 2021, the Governing Board was wanting to assess the impact the foundation has had on increasing the sustainability of these projects. There were three primary dimensions being assessed.

  • Contributor growth
  • Contribution growth
  • Contributor diversity

We at the LF know that seeing those metrics increasing is a good sign for a healthy, sustainable project.

Academy Software Foundation projects use LFX Insights as a tool for measuring community health. Using this tool enabled us to build some helpful charts which illustrated the impacts of being a part of the Academy Software Foundation.

We took the approach of looking at before and after data on the contributor, contribution, and contributor diversity.

Here is one of the charts that John shared. You can view all of them on his post. 

LFX dashboard example

Conclusion 

LFX will improve communication and collaboration, simplify management, surface the best projects and project leaders, and provide insightful guidance based on real data captured at scale, across the widest variety of projects ever collected into a single source of information. And it is available to you – all Linux Foundation members and projects have access to LFX. 

To learn more about what it can do for you and your organization and project(s), read our white paper (LINK), read posts in the LFX Community Forum, or just log in with your free LFID and give it a spin. And check back here on the LF Blog for more articles in the coming months on LFX – digging in deeper. 

If you would like to talk to someone at the Linux Foundation about LFX or membership, reach out to Jen Shelby at jshelby@linuxfoundation.org. 

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LFX Platform: An Update on Growing and Sustaining Open Source

Open source fuels the world’s innovation, yet building impactful, innovative, high-quality, and secure software at scale can be challenging when meeting the growing requirements of open source communities. Over the past two decades, we have learned that ecosystem building is complex. A solution was needed to help communities manage themselves with the proper toolsets in key functional domains.

From infrastructure to legal and compliance, from code security to marketing, our experience in project governance among communities within the Linux Foundation has accumulated years of expertise and proven best practices. As a result, we have spent the year productizing the LFX Platform, a suite of tools engineered to grow and sustain and grow the communities of today and build the communities of tomorrow. 

LFX: The Open Source Community Management Toolsuite for Continued Growth

The LFX Platform tools provide our members and projects with tools to support every stage of an open source project, from funding to community management to application security. LFX is built to support the needs of all community participants; maintainers, contributors, community managers, security professionals, marketers, and more.

  • Open source communities need access to better tools to scale.
  • Developers need to be able to make effective code contributions, scan for security vulnerabilities, and deploy.
  • Community managers need to facilitate meetings, host meet-ups online or in-person, support governing boards, and decide on proper governance structures.
  • Project leadership needs to be responsive, provide support, engage in training, and promote their latest developments. 

We aim to help reduce the complexity of building and managing open source ecosystems by delivering a new platform that brings people, information, tools, and supporting programs together.

We want to invite you to explore LFX. First, create your LFID needed to login. Then jump into experiencing LFX elements such as your Individual Dashboard, Mentorship, EasyCLA, Insights, or Security. The LFX platform provides open source communities the following areas of key functionality:

LFX Platform Key Functional Areas

LFX Platform: New Features and Capabilities

Global Trends and Compare Projects capabilities extend LFX insights with new reports and enable community members to easily answer common questions about their open source ecosystem or quickly compare open source communities to identify and drive best practices.

Global Trends and Compare Projects Dashboards

Security Vulnerabilities and Code Secrets Scanning, with Remediation powered by Snyk and BluBracket, is now available in LFX Security. Enabling communities to automatically scan code and detect potential vulnerabilities or exposed code secrets then recommend fixes to remediate the identified issues.

Security Vulnerabilities and Code Secrets Scanning with Remediation

Non-Inclusive Language Detection is now a part of LFX Security through integration with BluBracket, enabling the identification and elimination of non-inclusive language to attract and retain more participants and deliver on the power and promise of more diverse and inclusive open source communities.

Tool Highlight: LFX Security

The world’s most critical infrastructure is built on open source, and therefore the security of open source software is essential. LFX Security builds on the Core Infrastructure Initiative and the Open Source Security Foundation and years of learned security best practices to provide communities with the capabilities required to secure their code continuously. LFX Security is powered by integrations with leading security vendors and supports existing tools and languages.

  • Automatic vulnerability scanning, with recommended fixes and inline remediation
  • Risk analysis with intuitive and informative scoring 
  • Automatic detection of potential code secrets
  • Identification of non-inclusive language in code 

Learn more about LFX Security at lfx.dev/tools/security

Tool Highlight: LFX Insights

Successful open source communities require effective management of everything from code quality and build to collaboration and marketing. But to manage them effectively, data has to be gathered across disparate repositories, tools, and activities. LFX Insights integrates data from source code repositories to issue trackers, social media platforms to mailing lists and contextualizes projects, project groups, or the entire Linux Foundation ecosystem.

Learn more about LFX Insights at lfx.dev/tools/insights

The LFX platform is designed to address these issues and more. LFX aggregates dozens of data sources and commonly used management. It provides visualization tools with an added layer of intelligence to reveal best practices for numerous open source stakeholders, including developers, project leaders, open source program offices, legal, operations, and even marketing. 

LFX is a suite of elements engineered to grow and sustain and grow the communities of today and build the communities of tomorrow. By automating and consolidating many of the most critical activities needed by open source projects and stakeholders, we hope to reduce complexities that sometimes hinder innovation and progress. 

The LFX platform provides our members and project with tools to support every stage of an open source project. As we head into 2022, we plan to release even more functionality to support our growing community.

Create your LFID and Explore LFX at lfx.linuxfoundation.org

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Advance Your Open Source Skills with Real-World Mentorships

It’s no question that hiring open source talent is a top priority for hiring managers. But how can you gain the skills you need to stand out from the crowd? Training courses and certifications are a great place to start (and our curriculum is built by some of the world’s top open source leaders). But, likely, you’ll also want to advance your open source skills with real-world experience through a mentorship program.

Open source talent is in demand

Mentees and Mentors gather at a past Linux Foundation event.
Mentees & Mentors gather at a past Linux Foundation event

According to the 2020 Open Source Jobs Report, 81% of hiring managers said that hiring open source talent was a top priority. And these numbers are expected to grow, with more companies looking to hire new talent in Linux, DevOps, cloud, and security.

While this is good news for the open source job market, nearly all hiring managers (93%) say they’re struggling to find the right talent with sufficient skills. Current employees are also eager to up-level their skills, with 68% of open source professionals reporting they planned to get certified within the year (up from a steady 47% since 2016).

Remote work due to COVID-19 has made it even easier for many professionals to access these programs. But they can still be costly if your employer doesn’t cover exam costs or if you’re just entering the open source workforce. Additionally, many employers require previous work experience before hiring recent grads, which typically requires completing an internship or mentorship.

How Moja Global built mentorships during COVID-19

This is exactly the situation that many university students found themselves in last fall when traditional internship opportunities dried up due to the pandemic. Not only are these programs a prerequisite for graduation, they’re essential to landing jobs out of school.

Faced with this challenge, a group of students in India reached out to Moja Global (whose mission is to support ambitious climate change) about creating an internship project to tackle climate change and deforestation. Project leaders reached out to their community to source mentors, and this quickly developed into the Using Machine Learning to Predict Deforestation mentorship.

Moja Global Mentorship, Fall 2020
Moja Global Mentorship, Fall 2020

This fostered rich discussions between students and mentors from a wide range of backgrounds, resulting in innovative solutions to the project’s problems. And most importantly, mentees were able to build their skills through hands-on experience. They worked alongside mentors who are top contributors themselves, to develop open source projects with real-world applications.

Real-world experience through mentorships

While certifications and training programs can help you learn the foundational skills of open source, think of a mentorship as the chance to apply that knowledge. Moja Global’s program is just one of many hosted each year as part of the Linux Foundation Mentorship Program.

These mentorship programs are designed to give mentees real-world experience contributing to some of the world’s most critical open source projects. This program aims to help train the next generation of open source developers, with an emphasis on diversity and inclusion.

As a mentee you’ll learn from experienced open source contributors. You’ll work on real projects like the Linux Kernel, LF Networking, Hyperledger, and others. And you’ll have the chance to gain invaluable connections to your mentors and peers, which can lead to future opportunities upon graduation.

The entire program is run through LFX Mentorship, which streamlines everything from task assignments and progress reports, to stipend payments and mentorship communications. Upon graduation, you’ll walk away with a certificate of graduation and a lot of applicable experience.

Daniel W. S. Almeida credits his Linux Kernel Mentorship with helping initiate his software engineering career. “This remote internship provided me with a taste of what working with the kernel community is like,” he explains. “The mentorship program and its mentors’ structure is paramount to get new developers on track. It was also so much fun to be a part of!” He plans to continue contributing to the kernel and is now also a Vidtv Maintainer.

To date, 175 mentees have graduated from Linux Foundation mentorships and more than $700k in stipends have been paid out to mentees. We also have a thriving community of more than 200 active mentors who provide expert support and training. And these numbers continue to grow with new mentorships launching each term.

Current Mentorship Programs:

  • Linux Kernel
  • LF Networking
  • Hyperledger
  • CNCF
  • OpenHPC
  • Open Mainframe Project
  • GraphQL
Find a Mentorship Today!

3 tips to find the right mentorship fit

Interested in participating? The first step is to apply! But don’t wait. Spots are limited and the deadline for Fall term applications is this Thursday, August 12th.

Here are a few tips to apply:

  1. Read the program guidelines
    Before you apply, take some time to read through program resources. While expectations can differ between mentorships, we encourage you to read through the Mentee Guide for details including eligibility requirements and how to prepare your application.
  2. Find the right mentorship for you
    Carefully review program details and requirements before you apply. Remember: You’ll be working with this project for the next few months, so make sure it’s the right fit. Think about the skills you’re looking to build during this mentorship, as well as how the experience will help you in your future career.
  3. Submit a stand-out application
    Cater your application to the program, just like you would when applying for a job. Many programs receive thousands of applications, so be sure to customize your application for the role. In addition to your relevant skills, we want to hear more about you and why you’re interested in this particular program.

Find your mentorship today on LFX

Does a mentorship program sound like the right fit for you? If so, you’d better hurry – applications for the Fall term close on Thursday, August 12.

Find a Mentorship Today!

Good luck! We look forward to seeing your docs and pull requests, contributing to projects which are changing the world!

Are you on the hiring side, looking to attract top talent for your open source initiatives? Consider launching a mentorship or sponsoring existing programs. Find out more here.

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How to Grow Your Community with Data-Driven Insights

How to Grow Your Community with Data-Driven Insights

Learn how to harness project data analytics to grow your open source community and ensure project health. In this blog post we’ll cover:

  • Where to start when building a data-driven engagement plan.
  • How to use tools like LFX Insights to build a picture of your current ecosystem
  • Quick steps you can take to start growing your community today

Building a strong community is critical for the long-term success of any open source project. After all, Kubernetes didn’t become the leader it is now without the power of a highly engaged, global community of contributors. But how can a project grow that kind of following? You first have to know who’s already part of your team.

It starts with your community

In-person events like KubeCon 2019 are one way to develop a healthy open source project community.
KubeCon 2019

We know community development is important, but projects often struggle to understand their current base of contributors. To build a complete view of your ecosystem, you need more than just pull requests and commits. You need to understand the people behind these numbers: Where do they work? What other projects do they contribute to? Are they engaging with your project elsewhere–on social media, events, or training courses?

You also need to understand how the community you’re building impacts the growth of your project. Sure, you might be able to pull insights data from GitHub, but do you know which companies are contributing most to your project? And what about across all of your projects and sub-projects? Also, how does your project health compare against other, similar projects out there?

Finding answers in data

These questions are top of mind for projects like the TARS Foundation, who see data as a lens through which to understand and grow their community. They’ve thought a lot about how data can help address critical project health and sustainability questions, and have come up with an approach to measure the health of their open source community.

I’m sure you’ll agree that knowing more about your community through data helps you make more informed decisions. But pulling together the variety of metrics to give you that holistic view may seem daunting. Most open source communities use an assortment of tools that typically don’t have built-in integrations. Just hunting these down can be challenging, not to mention aggregating and analyzing the data.

Your data in one place

Successful open source projects like the TARS Foundation and Kubernetes skipped this pain and found a solution, using the Linux Foundation’s LFX Insights.

LFX Insights provides a holistic view of your project’s data across 15+ sources. This includes CI/CD insights from tools like GitHub, Jenkins, and CircleCI; stories and issues from tools like Jira; and social engagement data from Slack, Cision, Twitter, and more. For more complex open source projects such as the TARS Foundation, subproject data can be aggregated into rolled-up dashboards providing a big-picture view of your overall project health, engineering efficiency, and project ecosystem without any manual report generation.

LFX Insights has 15+ data sources to measure open source project health, engineering efficiency, and community development.
15+ Data Sources and Growing

Grow your community with data

So how do you make the most of all this data to build a thriving community? Here are a few steps to get you started.

Step 1: Turn your goals into questions

Data is only as good as how you use it. Before you go too far down a rabbit hole, identify your goals and focus them around 1-3 questions. For example, if your goal is to grow your community then consider starting with questions about your current audience.

  • Goal: Grow our project community by X% in the next year.
  • Questions:
    • What does our community currently look like?
    • What motivates them to contribute and engage with us?
    • How does our community compare with other projects similar to us?

Step 2: Dive into the data

You have your set of questions, so now you’re ready to identify the appropriate data sources and what to look for. Let’s revisit our questions from step 1 and start searching LFX Insights for answers.

  • Question: What does our community currently look like?
    • Use Technical Metrics Dashboards to identify top contributors and companies.
    • You can also find your most engaged influencers on Twitter using the Social Media Metrics Dashboards.
  • Question: What motivates them to contribute and engage with us?
    • Identify popular keywords and topics related to your project with Ecosystem Metrics and Social Media Metrics Dashboards.
    • Submit a request to expand this list to include custom topics or hashtags to track events or competitors of interest.
  • Question: How does our community compare with other projects similar to us?
    • Compare your project’s performance against similar projects and track growth trends over time using the Compare Project Health (Beta) Dashboard.

Use these insights to set a baseline (which you will measure against later), a target (we will grow to match X project), and a strategy (what’s next). But remember: While data can give you a good picture of what’s going on, you may need to do additional research (like interviews or surveys) to get the full answer.

Step 3: Convert learnings into action

Once you have a data-driven picture of your current community, it’s time to build an engagement plan. So here are some easy community-building ideas to get you started.

  • Share Community Leaderboard stats with your community to highlight your top contributors and encourage healthy competition. Also, be sure to check out the top hashtags from your Social Media Metrics Dashboards to get inspiration for blog and speaking topics that your community is interested in.
  • Use the top-10 company contribution rankings from the Technical Metrics Dashboards to motivate members into investing more time and resources.
  • Finally, offer rewards and incentives to your top influencers and contributors. It can be something as simple as sending an email to celebrate their work and say “thanks.” This will encourage and inspire others.

Step 4: Rinse and Repeat

Finally, continue to monitor your dashboards to make sure what you’re doing is working. Data updates automatically in LFX Insights, and new data sources are added regularly. So you’ll always have the most up-to-date view of performance.

Get started with LFX Insights

Hopefully this helps you consider using data to grow your project community. LFX Insights is a powerful tool to get you started, so why not take advantage of it?

RISC-V International (beta)
Contributors
34.94K
Contributions
1.57M
Commits
1.54M
Repositories
105
Lines of Code
30.74M
Go to Overview
Linux Kernel (beta)
Contributors
27.53K
Contributions
948.07K
Commits
947.63K
Repositories
1
Lines of Code
22.04M
Go to Overview
Yocto Project
Contributors
10.00K
Contributions
1.08M
Commits
220.68K
Repositories
140
Lines of Code
11.59M
Go to Overview
Explore Insights

LFX Insights is available for all projects hosted by the Linux Foundation. So whether you’re a contributor, end user, or enthusiast of open source technologies, you’ll have access to data about the projects you care about. Check out http://insights.lfx.dev to get started.

Need more help making the most of LFX Insights for your project or company? Have a specific report or research project in mind? We’d be happy to help! Please reach out to set up some time with us.

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Insights Release: July 2021 – Social Media Dashboards

Insights Release: July 2021

As someone who is key to driving your open source community’s technical direction, governance, and steering, how do you measure and understand engagement with your project contributors on Social Media? Which topics being discussed on these networks have the most impact or influence on your project’s development and overall adoption?

LFX Insights now supports Twitter, the most popular social media channel for many open source project communities. Keep reading to learn more about this release and how to make the most of the new Social Media Dashboards, and gain a better understanding of your project’s ecosystem and identify opportunities for deeper engagement with key contributors and trending topics in your industry.

Release Highlights:

  • Social Media Metrics Dashboards: Six new Social Media Metrics Dashboards provide high-level insights into a project’s social media engagement and ecosystem, including content performance, trending hashtags, and top contributors.
  • New Data Source – Twitter: This release includes Twitter support for channel- and post-level metric and hashtag search functionality. Additional social media channels coming soon.

Cutting Through the Noise

Does your project use Twitter to share updates and engage with your community? If so, how do you keep track of all the conversations happening out there–about your project and the greater open source world at large?

The social media space can get noisy, with more than 1M Twitter users following and engaging with #opensource content in just the past seven days, according to real-time hashtag tracker BrandMentions. And without deeper insights, how could you tap into the fact that #devops and #AI or #artificialintelligence are the top-trending hashtags for Kubernetes this week? Tracking these and more social media insights open new opportunities for relevant and timely engagement with your communities. But how to access these insights?

More than 1M Twitter users are following and engaging with #opensource content in just the past 7 days.

— BrandMentions

Built for Open Source Projects

There are a number of paid tools out there, such as Sprinklr and Sprout Social, but most of these are designed for large-scale enterprises. These platforms tend to be costly, often requiring complex set-up to get started. Those that do offer small business options still charge per user for access, a cost that can add up for an open source project with a large pool of project maintainers and community managers needing access. This just doesn’t cut it for most open source projects, who see the value of social media insights to help drive community engagement, but may not have the large marketing budgets required to purchase these traditional tools.

We launched Ecosystem Trends Earned Media Dashboards earlier this year to help fill this need for project community teams, as part of a greater vision to provide a complete picture of your project’s ecosystem. This is provided through LFX Insights for all projects hosted by the Linux Foundation, and everyone who is a contributor or supporting member of that project has access free of charge.

Tools For Richer Social Media Engagement

This vision is one step closer to being realized, with Twitter support and Social Media Metrics Dashboards. While Ecosystem Trends provide a high-level overview of your broader community, these six new dashboards give you a deeper understanding of what’s happening and where to engage. Here’s a quick description of each of them.

High-level View: Overview Dashboard

Monitor the overall health and performance of your project’s Twitter accounts and trending keywords on the Overview Dashboard. This dashboard provides a high-level overview of the project’s channel-level performance, including follower metrics, post summary, and a breakdown of top hashtags.

Twitter Overview Dashboard

Overview Dashboard Metrics Include:

  • Twitter Insights: Get a top-level glimpse of how well you’re performing on social media with key metrics related to your project’s Twitter accounts.
  • Tweets Summary: See what’s been published by your project’s Twitter account for a given time period, and how well each piece of content is performing.
  • Hashtags Summary: Hashtags are an important indicator of what topics are trending for your project community. See the top ones used in your posts and related conversations (i.e., retweets).
  • Links (URLs) Summary: Understand where you’re sending your Twitter followers most often by tracking the performance of the links you share, including which are clicked on.
  • Languages Summary: Get to know the breakdown of your global audience by tracking the languages they use the most in conversation with your project’s Twitter account.
  • Contributors Summary: Who are your top engagers on Twitter? Understanding who is most engaged with your project’s account can help you turn followers into advocates.

Content Performance: Tweets, Links (URLs), and Languages Dashboards

Dive into these dashboards for a deeper understanding of how your social media content is performing. Identify which posts are most popular on the Tweets Dashboard, or identify the top languages used by your community on the Languages Dashboard. The Links (URLs) Dashboard is especially useful for keeping track of content engagement.

Tweets Dashboard

Tweets Dashboard Metrics:

  • Tweets: This table ranks all of your Twitter content in a given time period by potential impressions, giving you a great understanding of which posts have been the most successful at reaching your community.
  • Tweet Breakdown: Understand how engaged your community is with your content with this colored bar graph showing tweets and retweets on a periodic basis.
  • Likes Over Time: See how well-liked your content is overall with this bar graph that represents the number of likes received on your tweets over time.
  • Retweets Over Time: Track how often your community is resharing your posts with this simple line graph that represents the number of retweets over time.
  • Tweet Frequency: Measure how much content you post on Twitter with this shaded line graph that depicts the total number of tweets posted by your project’s account over time.
Links (URLs) Dashboard

  • Links (URL) Summary: View the links that you’ve shared in your Twitter posts for a given time period, ranked by potential impressions. This table includes links to the URLs, total number of contributors who tweeted or retweeted the URL, along with the number of tweets and retweets by contributors in the time range.
  • Top URLs by Tweets: Get a quick breakdown of the top-performing URLs you’ve shared, ranked by the number of times they’re mentioned over a period of time.
Languages Dashboard

Languages Dashboard Metrics:

  • Languages Used: Understand which languages you and your community are using to engage on social media. This table ranks languages used across published tweets and (i.e., retweets), ordered by the number of tweets.
  • Top Languages by Tweets: Get a quick view of the most-used languages over a given time period with this curved line graph.

Track the hashtags that are relevant to your project community and identify new trending topics to engage with. This dashboard provides an overview of hashtag usage and performance across the project’s Twitter posts and related conversations (i.e., retweets).

Hashtags Dashboards

Hashtags Dashboard Metrics:

  • Hashtags Used: Understand what topics are trending in your project’s Twitter posts and conversations. This table lists top trending hashtags ordered by highest potential impressions.
  • Top Hashtags: Use this hashtag word cloud to quickly see the topics most associated with your project’s Twitter posts and conversations.
  • Top Hashtags Breakdown: Get a feel for the volume of conversations around your top hashtags with this pie chart that gives you a breakdown by percentage and number of times the hashtag is mentioned in tweets and retweets.

Tap Into Your Community: Contributors Dashboard

One of the most powerful tools for any open source project is your community. Turn followers into advocates by engaging with your community and showing your appreciation to top contributors. This dashboard provides an overview of social media users (i,e., contributors or influencers) who have engaged with the project’s Twitter posts or mentioned their account. An engagement can be a like, comment, or retweet.

Contributors Dashboard

Contributors Dashboard Metrics:

  • Contributors List: Identify your most engaged contributors so you can turn them into your advocates. This table lists the Twitter handles that have engaged most with your content, ordered by the most number of potential impressions for the tweets and retweets by that user.
  • User Mentions: Who from your project community are you showing love to? Who might you be missing? Use this table to monitor which Twitter handles are mentioned most often in your tweets within a selected time range.

Make the Most of LFX Insights – Connect Your Twitter Account

Make the most of LFX Insights and nurture deeper engagement with your project community on social media. All projects hosted by the Linux Foundation can take advantage of these new Social Media Dashboards. We’ll be working closely with project teams over the next few weeks to connect their Twitter accounts and capture key search terms and hashtags to track. So if you don’t yet see Twitter data for your project on Insights, know that it’s coming soon.

Social Media Dashboards with no data source configured

If you’re in charge of social media for your project, simply reach out to connect Twitter as a data source for your project.

Request Twitter Setup

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LFX Crowdfunding: The Fundraising Tool for the Open Source Community

It isn’t always hard to spot open source initiatives with great potential. When several end users have deployed a new solution or feature set and organizations have used it to fill a gaping business need or functionality gap, mass marketplace validation may not be far behind. But what determines whether an emerging innovation becomes the next Kubernetes or quietly remains in the shadows never to draw large-scale awareness? Oftentimes, the main factor is funding.

We created LFX Crowdfunding to increase the odds of making the projects that could have a profound impact on the open source and larger business communities financially viable. It differs from other public fundraising tools in that it was built by an open source organization, for the open source community, and in a manner consistent with open source values. Our twist on public underwriting provides several unique advantages that won’t be found in competing crowdfunding tools or alternative funding models.

It’s Tailor-made for Critical Projects

Crowdfunding was designed to help developers, project maintainers, end users, individual investors, companies, and other stakeholders raise and manage the money needed to expand the reach of fast-growing, potentially game-changing innovations. With a focus on project quality rather than quantity, Crowdfunding is intended for those select initiatives that are gaining steam in the community, adding thousands of new users each year, and on the cusp of widespread adoption. The tool helps purveyors of these increasingly popular experimental features and functionality attract all of the resources, tangible and intangible, needed to achieve massive scale.

The LFX Crowdfunding platform

It’s Neutral

LFX Crowdfunding is an alternative to the gig economy model, on which the tech industry is increasingly relying. It ensures neutrality in a way that isn’t possible when a developer signs a statement of work with an individual company for a single project. The gig economy’s pay-to-play dynamic potentially locks freelancing open source specialists into the payor’s vision for a feature, functionality, or business process, which could limit their flexibility to incorporate the community’s input should its desires conflict with the funder’s. Crowdfunding enables innovators to remain neutral in their development efforts—money comes into a central “portal,” and project contributors can apply it to what’s best for the new technology project, meetup or event, security audit, or travel initiative as a whole.

Start Raising Funds

It’s Transparent

It’s important that individuals and companies know that project participants are spending their money efficiently and responsibly at all times. That’s why LFX Crowdfunding grants funders access to all spending records associated with the open source programs they back. Technical and financial contributors can log into the Crowdfunding portal anytime to view every stipend, travel expense, laptop purchase, or any other expenditure associated with a project. And unlike competing public fundraising offerings that come with no oversight on project maintainers, every expense request is fully vetted by LFX to ensure adherence to strict spending policies which require that all outlays are reasonable and vital to the project.

KiCad Project Ledger
KiCad Project Ledger

Governance measures and compliance enforcement don’t end there. Project maintainers, participating finance contributors, and administrators can utilize timesheets in the Crowdfunding app for work-time accounting purposes, thereby giving benefactors the peace of mind that labor is productive and allocated appropriately. Dashboards provide those same stakeholders leading or executing a given initiative visibility into the progress made in reaching stated objectives and overall project performance at any given time.

It’s Dependable

Enterprise Adoption

With many backers betting large sums of money on Crowdfunding projects, the Linux Foundation also sets and actively enforces high technical standards generally expected of any corporate entity. To that end, the Linux Foundation actively verifies and displays proof that vulnerabilities have been detected and bugs are continually being fixed. The neutral nonprofit also confirms and displays a list of all enterprises using an asset at the heart of a given project in the Crowdfunding app so that contributors have a sense of which and how many organizations will benefit from the initiative.

It Frees You Up to Code

Critical open source projects like the Linux Kernel and Kubernetes have inherent legal and tax implications that add a layer of accounting and compliance work. These responsibilities take open source professionals away from the core tasks at hand. Thus, in addition to providing spending oversight and governance, we process all of the required tax documentation at the end of each fiscal year, including those for personnel and donations. With LFX Crowdfunding, software programmers can focus on what they do best—coding, testing, and fixing bugs—rather than burning precious time on administrative duties.

It’s Free

Since many open source projects are grassroots by nature, project leaders cannot afford to have social funding platform costs eat too much into their budgets. While others charge anywhere from 5 to 13 percent for general use of their crowdfunding applications, credit card processing, and tax form preparation, project founders don’t pay a penny for the first $10 million raised via LFX Crowdfunding—those proceeds go directly toward creating value, which is particularly critical to our members who typically aren’t working with massive budgets and must make efficient use of resources.

The Linux Foundation is exploring ways to work with corporate sponsors to make the entire service free in the future, thereby increasing the odds that new developments that could be of value to them and others in the business world survive and thrive.

It’s Flexible

Individuals or companies anywhere in the world can make one-time or recurring contributions via credit card or invoiced payment.

LFX Crowdfunding helps those looking to initiate new open source projects find everything they need in one place—they can now get financing, in addition to technology, legal, training, and project management support. Software coders looking to fill a technology gap, find a market for a crucial back-end process, or piece together solutions using existing open-source tools can use Crowdfunding to get their projects off the ground and draw those initial large-scale investors that lay the foundation for a “stickier” membership model.

The Linux Foundation has put more than $800,000 of its own money toward many of the promising initiatives being financed by Crowdfunding and will continue to do so in the future. After all, sometimes it takes a crowd to bankroll the next Linux Kernel.

Discover Opportunities to Donate
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