The Linux Foundation Spring Mentorship Program is now underway. This is a great opportunity for students and developers looking to improve their skills and get more involved in open source projects. But what exactly is a mentorship?
You’ve probably been hearing the term “mentorship” for as long as you’ve been alive. The generations that are now of working age in 2021 have added to it technologically and expanded on how they can be executed. Technology has also opened the doors for new mentorship opportunities, especially in technical skills like open source development.
New industries, and therefore mentorship opportunities, are popping up every day because the world needs more people with specialized knowledge. That’s good news for anyone entering a new industry.
What Is Mentoring?
Still, in 2021, what does mentoring really mean? The Linux Foundation expands on the definition used by the Association for Talent Development,
“Mentoring is a reciprocal and collaborative at-will relationship that most often occurs between open source experts and new developers for the purpose of the mentee’s growth, learning, and career development and adding new talent to open source projects for their health and sustainability.”
To further that definition, not all mentorships are created equal. There are ways to be more or less formal about the arrangement, depending on many factors. The key difference when it comes to the formality of the arrangement relates to the boundaries.
In a more formal mentoring relationship, a mentor might set strict goals and deadlines with the mentee, whereas an informal relationship might be more open-ended and self-guided by the mentee. Also, some mentorships are paid, and some are not. What you choose will be dependent on your goals and circumstances.
Something that’s always consistent about mentorships, however, is that there are countless benefits to taking part in one.
The Benefits
Networking opportunities, insider perspective, closing skill gaps, and being in the right place at the right time are just a few major benefits that mentorships can afford you, especially in hyper-competitive niches like tech.
Networking potential itself is worth its weight in gold. Your mentorship experience will expose you to an entirely new pool of contacts and knowledge! This can open lots of new doors for you, and it’s a much more natural way to network as opposed to networking events.
For example, the Hyperledger Mentorship Program was created specifically to educate new-to-tech mentees on their blockchain software know-how, while also exposing them to industry leaders they’d otherwise never get to meet. As a remote program, offering networking opportunities is a huge value to offer mentees who might never see such chances.
The pressure to be in the right place at the right time can feel enormous at times in your career, and that’s why being around the right people and the right industry training is so important.
Another way mentorships can benefit you is by granting access to resources during a very important time in your career. The pressure to be in the right place at the right time can feel enormous at times in your career, and that’s why being around the right people and the right industry training is so important.
Linux Kernel Mentorship Program on the LFX Mentorship platform
For example, the Linux Foundation offers a mentorship working on Linux Kernel that, upon completion, will provide access to career opportunities and relationships in tech. Last year, eight mentees graduated from the Linux kernel bug fixing project, and one mentee is now a project maintainer. This is just one case where these programs are offering mentees the hard skills they need, and the right resources to put them to use.
Getting a mentor also offers an insider perspective to a career you think you may want to pursue! This can be enlightening to make sure you’re not diving into something you don’t know you enjoy. There is so much that learning a topic in school simply doesn’t prepare you for. Mentorships will provide you first hand experience within an industry, and that’s something only time can teach! That’s part of why the Open Mainframe Project has started their own mentorship program, focused on building the mainframe engineers of tomorrow.
You’ll have a serious leg up in an interview by showing that you’ve gone the extra mile to learn the programs they already run.
Finally, being mentored is a way to identify skill gaps that were not addressed in college. In many ways, a mentorship will offer you a head start over your competitors in the job market by providing you with a skill few other applicants have yet. You’ll have a serious leg up in an interview by showing that you’ve gone the extra mile to learn the programs they already run.
There are many different ways to structure a mentoring situation, with few wrong ways to do it. Whichever form of mentorship you may pursue, it’s a winning choice! You never know what you’ll learn, or what you’ll be inspired by within a mentorship opportunity. However, you can always be sure it will make you a stronger applicant.
Mentoring at the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation has a three-pronged approach to mentoring, which provides you with unstructured webinars, training courses, and structured mentoring programs. All of these efforts combine to advance a diverse, healthy, and vibrant open source community.
The Linux Foundation Mentorship Program was expanded last year in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, providing support for programs that help displaced people and less visible projects focused on tackling the crisis. Since then, it’s become an invaluable resource for students whose traditional internships were canceled due to the pandemic, as well as smaller projects tackling critical problems such as contact tracing and climate change.
Additionally, over the past several months the Linux Foundation has launched the LF Live Mentorship Series, morphing its speed mentorship style format into an expanded webinar format. This series compliments traditional mentorship programs, tackling specific technical areas in software development in 90-minute virtual sessions.
The LFX Mentorship platform
Of course, mentorship programs can only be as successful as the people who participate. This is why the Linux Foundation has built a self-service platform, LFX Mentorship, where anyone can come in and start their project. Since its launch in 2019, it has become an invaluable tool for mentees to find open opportunities, manage their progress in a mentorship program, and connect with their mentors.
The LFX Mentorship program has received 4,900+ applications, with 190+ mentees being accepted, and 270+ active mentors participating. In addition, $530,000 in stipends have already been distributed through the program.
Do you want to get involved? The Linux Foundation hosts mentorship programs seasonally, so there are plenty of opportunities to join. The Spring mentorship program is currently underway, and applications for the Summer program will start on April 15th. Be sure to check back regularly for open mentorship opportunities.
https://lfx.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/lf_logo.svg00Jono Baconhttps://lfx.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/lf_logo.svgJono Bacon2021-02-19 13:42:422021-02-19 18:07:57Unlocking Your Potential With Mentoring
We’ve been working hard to provide you with as much visibility into your project’s health and performance as possible through LFX Insights. Now we’re excited to give you even more context around project groups and ecosystem trends, so you can have a clearer picture of your impact within your community.
Measure Your Community Impact with Ecosystem Trends Dashboards
Earned Media Mentions Dashboard
Social media channels, paid social ads, and news outlets are excellent tools for engaging with your project’s ecosystem, but how can you be sure your message is getting across? We’re excited to announce new Earned Media dashboards in Insights > Ecosystem Trends.** These dashboards are built to help you track what your community is saying so you can play a more significant part in the conversation.
**The Ecosystem Trends dashboard is available to employees of members companies of the Linux Foundation, project maintainers, and members of formal project committees like Board, TOCs, Marketing/Outreach committees. Read the documentation for more details.
What’s New: Earned Media Dashboards
Content Dashboard: View your content’s Ad Equivalency, Readership and Impact.
Mention Dashboard: Track “Mentions by Location” and understand your content’s Reach using Social Amplification.
Share of Voice Dashboard: Compare Share of Voice over time, track Sentiment, and analyze Key Messages.
SEO Dashboard: Measure Website Traffic, Referrals, Media Mentions, and Search Optimization.
Viewing Insights Just Got Easier
Global Search
We’ve cleaned things up a bit so that navigating Insights is now easier than ever. Now when you land on the LFX Insights projects page, you’ll be able to search through all listed projects, differentiate between project groups and individual projects, and quickly access project dashboards.
What’s New: Enhanced Search & Navigation
LFX Toolkit Drop-down: Quickly navigate between the LFX tools.
Global Search: Search all projects within LFX Insights.
Project Group vs. Individual Project Cards: Differentiate between stacked Project Groups (e.g., CNCF) and individual Project Cards (e.g., Kubernetes is an individual project within the CNCF project group).
Multiple Ways to Access a Dashboard: Click a Project Card’s title or button to access that project’s dashboard.
Easily Differentiate between Project Groups and Individual Projects
Project Group Metrics Cards
Project cards and dashboards are clearly organized between project groups (e.g., CNCF) and individual projects (e.g., Kubernetes is an individual project within the CNCF project group). Project groups provide an aggregated overview so you can understand how all sub-projects are performing or drill down into a specific project.
** Project Group metrics are aggregated based on the available data from onboarded projects. Read the documentation for a full list of supported data sources.
What’s New: Project Groups & Summary Dashboards
Project Group Metrics Cards: Aggregated overview of metrics for all projects in the Project Group. Click on “Overview” or the “Project Group Summary” tab for a dashboard view of metrics for all projects in the Project Group.
Local Search: Search for projects within the Project Group.
Individual Project Cards: Quickly navigate to individual project overview dashboards.
Quickly Compare the Health of Multiple Projects
Project Health Comparison Dashboard (Beta)
Understand how your project is performing against the competition with the new Project Health Comparison Dashboard (Beta). Now you can compare multiple projects based on key metrics all on one dashboard. This dashboard is currently in beta, so expect new features coming soon.
What’s New: Compare Project Health (Beta)
Project Health Metrics: View a comprehensive listing of a project’s key performance metrics.
Multi-Project Comparison: Easily search for projects by name to add them to the dashboard table.
More Ways to Filter Community Contributions
Community Leaderboards
Understand who your most active contributors are so you know who to vote for in your next committee election. Community Leaderboards let you sort community contributors by a number of filter options, based on what activity is most important to you. The default view is “Code” commits data, but you can also view “GitHub PRs” and “GitHub Issues.” Or, select “All” to compare all data sources supported in this view.
What’s New: Community Leaderboard Filters
Filter by Data Source: View defaults to “Code” commits data, with two additional source options to filter by. Select “All” to view all available data sources.
Want to Learn More? Join our LFX Insights Webinar
Learn how to leverage data-driven LFX Insights to make informed decisions about your project’s performance beyond the code. Join us on Thursday, January 14th for this first webinar in our new series.
https://lfx.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/lf_logo.svg00Stephanie Rubensteinhttps://lfx.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/lf_logo.svgStephanie Rubenstein2021-01-05 14:02:532021-01-08 14:29:03What’s New in LFX Insights: Ecosystem Trends, Enhanced Search, Project Groups, and More
We’re excited to announce that the LFX platform is now available, expanding the former CommunityBridge to provide even more support for the open source ecosystem.
Last year we released CommunityBridge, featuring early access to three community-focused tools: Funding, Security (limited features), and Mentorship. Since then, our engineering team has been heads-down developing new features and tools to support open source project development. We’re now rolling out 10+ tools with more on the roadmap for early next year and rebranding as “LFX” to align with other resources provided by the Linux Foundation.
Why We Built LFX
Open source has evolved to power more than 80% of the technologies we use every day, dominating in key markets including the smartphone, supercomputer, and public cloud workload industries. But as open source projects become the technologies that we all depend on, they require far more than version control systems or source control management to maintain and scale.
Critical projects must have their finger on the pulse of their entire developer ecosystem, with tools tailored to key stakeholders driving project development, including maintainers, contributors, community managers, and more. But it can be difficult to find tools that serve the unique needs of open source projects. “Supporting the tooling choices of our communities is in our DNA, but the connective fabric that can unify control and visibility across stacks is missing,” explains Shubhra Kar, CTO and GM of Products and IT at the Linux Foundation.
“We developed LFX to be the ‘digital glue’ that connects control and visibility across tooling stacks, providing a holistic context of project ecosystems–from contributions and release pipelines, to security index and end user adoption.”
Tools for Everyone
The Linux Foundation has spent years developing a proven methodology to transform projects into category leaders. LFX operationalizes this approach, providing a suite of tools built to facilitate every aspect of open source development.
Developed by the Linux Foundation engineers, LFX directly supports projects and empowers open source developers to write better, more secure code and grow sustainable ecosystems. These tools are a culmination of extensive industry knowledge and years of experience growing some of the world’s most critical open source projects.
The LFX Platform features 10+ tools designed exclusively for open source project development.
Available tools include…
Insights gives a contextualized ecosystem view–regardless of the environments you use. Understand your contributor community and make informed decisions with our analytics and reporting tools.
Security (Beta) provides automated scanning to detect potential vulnerabilities and weaknesses, proposing recommended fixes where available to help projects address top security concerns.
Individual Dashboard is your self-service hub for all of your open source activity. Build your personal community profile, manage credentials and contact details, display badges for completing certifications and other accomplishments, and enjoy a seamless login experience across the major systems used by the Linux Foundation projects.
EasyCLA is the only tool to support both individual and corporate contributor license agreement (CLA) workflows, making the process easier for everyone while maintaining project development velocity.
Mentorship makes it easy to sponsor and help train the next generation of open source developers by serving key needs of the community. Invest in building a stronger and more diverse community of qualified developers and engineers.
Crowdfunding enables individuals and organizations to donate by providing a neutral and trusted platform managed by the Linux Foundation that meets the unique fundraising needs of open source projects.
Member Enrollment makes it easier than ever for people to join your community with streamlined registration forms, automated contract execution, and a seamless onboarding experience that gets them set up in minutes.
Landscape is a tool that lets you visualize your project ecosystem so that you can understand how well your project is performing downstream.
Community Events provides local community organizers with the tools they need to host local meetings. Whether planning a virtual event or working with local organizers, our robust platform has you covered.
Training Portal is a self-service, unified console that lets both individuals and organizations participate, track, and manage their training and certification needs.
Project Control Center(Limited Access Beta Early 2021) helps you get started quickly by providing all the support you’ll need with self-service configuration for governance, membership, IT, developer and collaboration tools, documentation, and community roles.
Like all modern software, LFX is built using open source code and is integrated with a wide array of different systems–from GitHub, to Slack, to Google Workspace. We plan to release much of this code as open source in the near future, allowing our communities to meet their own needs through collaborative development. However, we still have much work to do before our code is ready for others to dive into. As with many leading OSS projects, this process takes time and we want to get things right so that our communities can benefit. In the meantime, we would love your feedback on what you would like to see in the future from LFX and the Linux Foundation.
What the Community is Saying
LFX means new opportunities for the open source community. “LFX brings our vision to a whole new level,” explains Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director of FINOS. “It’ll give our community access to an even more powerful set of tools and insights, based on the world class expertise of the Linux Foundation and their years of experience managing the world’s most mission-critical OSS projects.”
“LFX brings our vision to a whole new level…”
Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director of FINOS
Perhaps the most anticipated tools in the LFX suite is Insights, which will provide visibility into project performance and ecosystem trends. “One of the biggest challenges for open source projects is being able to define, track, and review key project metrics.” This is according to Jim St. Leger, TAC Chair of LF Edge and early Insights user. “LFX Insights is a fantastic tool that quickly lets people look at key project statistics… and is already becoming a great open source asset.”
But it’s our hope that the open source community will benefit from these tools as well. Students such as Animesh Kumar are the future of open source, and his experience as a mentee in the Q2 2020 Mentorship program was, according to him, “a learning experience of a lifetime… I truly encourage anyone who wants to start contributing to CNCF or other open source projects to participate in this program.”
Developers and sponsors of open source projects hosted by the Linux Foundation can benefit from these tools today. Simply log in with your Linux Foundation account and get started. Other tools, including Crowdfunding and Mentorship, provide valuable resources and best practices to projects not hosted at the Linux Foundation as well as the extended open source community. Find out more about LFX and the Linux Foundation at lfx.linuxfoundation.org.
https://lfx.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/lf_logo.svg00LFXhttps://lfx.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/lf_logo.svgLFX2020-11-11 08:00:002020-11-13 07:44:53Introducing LFX, Tools Built for Open Technology Project Development
Unlocking Your Potential With Mentoring
BlogThe Linux Foundation Spring Mentorship Program is now underway. This is a great opportunity for students and developers looking to improve their skills and get more involved in open source projects. But what exactly is a mentorship?
Read on to learn what Jono Bacon, leading speaker on community and author of People Powered: How communities can supercharge your business, brand, and teams, has to say.
You’ve probably been hearing the term “mentorship” for as long as you’ve been alive. The generations that are now of working age in 2021 have added to it technologically and expanded on how they can be executed. Technology has also opened the doors for new mentorship opportunities, especially in technical skills like open source development.
New industries, and therefore mentorship opportunities, are popping up every day because the world needs more people with specialized knowledge. That’s good news for anyone entering a new industry.
What Is Mentoring?
Still, in 2021, what does mentoring really mean? The Linux Foundation expands on the definition used by the Association for Talent Development,
“Mentoring is a reciprocal and collaborative at-will relationship that most often occurs between open source experts and new developers for the purpose of the mentee’s growth, learning, and career development and adding new talent to open source projects for their health and sustainability.”
To further that definition, not all mentorships are created equal. There are ways to be more or less formal about the arrangement, depending on many factors. The key difference when it comes to the formality of the arrangement relates to the boundaries.
In a more formal mentoring relationship, a mentor might set strict goals and deadlines with the mentee, whereas an informal relationship might be more open-ended and self-guided by the mentee. Also, some mentorships are paid, and some are not. What you choose will be dependent on your goals and circumstances.
Something that’s always consistent about mentorships, however, is that there are countless benefits to taking part in one.
The Benefits
Networking opportunities, insider perspective, closing skill gaps, and being in the right place at the right time are just a few major benefits that mentorships can afford you, especially in hyper-competitive niches like tech.
Networking potential itself is worth its weight in gold. Your mentorship experience will expose you to an entirely new pool of contacts and knowledge! This can open lots of new doors for you, and it’s a much more natural way to network as opposed to networking events.
For example, the Hyperledger Mentorship Program was created specifically to educate new-to-tech mentees on their blockchain software know-how, while also exposing them to industry leaders they’d otherwise never get to meet. As a remote program, offering networking opportunities is a huge value to offer mentees who might never see such chances.
Another way mentorships can benefit you is by granting access to resources during a very important time in your career. The pressure to be in the right place at the right time can feel enormous at times in your career, and that’s why being around the right people and the right industry training is so important.
For example, the Linux Foundation offers a mentorship working on Linux Kernel that, upon completion, will provide access to career opportunities and relationships in tech. Last year, eight mentees graduated from the Linux kernel bug fixing project, and one mentee is now a project maintainer. This is just one case where these programs are offering mentees the hard skills they need, and the right resources to put them to use.
Getting a mentor also offers an insider perspective to a career you think you may want to pursue! This can be enlightening to make sure you’re not diving into something you don’t know you enjoy. There is so much that learning a topic in school simply doesn’t prepare you for. Mentorships will provide you first hand experience within an industry, and that’s something only time can teach! That’s part of why the Open Mainframe Project has started their own mentorship program, focused on building the mainframe engineers of tomorrow.
Finally, being mentored is a way to identify skill gaps that were not addressed in college. In many ways, a mentorship will offer you a head start over your competitors in the job market by providing you with a skill few other applicants have yet. You’ll have a serious leg up in an interview by showing that you’ve gone the extra mile to learn the programs they already run.
There are many different ways to structure a mentoring situation, with few wrong ways to do it. Whichever form of mentorship you may pursue, it’s a winning choice! You never know what you’ll learn, or what you’ll be inspired by within a mentorship opportunity. However, you can always be sure it will make you a stronger applicant.
Mentoring at the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation has a three-pronged approach to mentoring, which provides you with unstructured webinars, training courses, and structured mentoring programs. All of these efforts combine to advance a diverse, healthy, and vibrant open source community.
The Linux Foundation Mentorship Program was expanded last year in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, providing support for programs that help displaced people and less visible projects focused on tackling the crisis. Since then, it’s become an invaluable resource for students whose traditional internships were canceled due to the pandemic, as well as smaller projects tackling critical problems such as contact tracing and climate change.
Additionally, over the past several months the Linux Foundation has launched the LF Live Mentorship Series, morphing its speed mentorship style format into an expanded webinar format. This series compliments traditional mentorship programs, tackling specific technical areas in software development in 90-minute virtual sessions.
Of course, mentorship programs can only be as successful as the people who participate. This is why the Linux Foundation has built a self-service platform, LFX Mentorship, where anyone can come in and start their project. Since its launch in 2019, it has become an invaluable tool for mentees to find open opportunities, manage their progress in a mentorship program, and connect with their mentors.
Do you want to get involved? The Linux Foundation hosts mentorship programs seasonally, so there are plenty of opportunities to join. The Spring mentorship program is currently underway, and applications for the Summer program will start on April 15th. Be sure to check back regularly for open mentorship opportunities.
What’s New in LFX Insights: Ecosystem Trends, Enhanced Search, Project Groups, and More
BlogWe’ve been working hard to provide you with as much visibility into your project’s health and performance as possible through LFX Insights. Now we’re excited to give you even more context around project groups and ecosystem trends, so you can have a clearer picture of your impact within your community.
Measure Your Community Impact with Ecosystem Trends Dashboards
Social media channels, paid social ads, and news outlets are excellent tools for engaging with your project’s ecosystem, but how can you be sure your message is getting across? We’re excited to announce new Earned Media dashboards in Insights > Ecosystem Trends.** These dashboards are built to help you track what your community is saying so you can play a more significant part in the conversation.
**The Ecosystem Trends dashboard is available to employees of members companies of the Linux Foundation, project maintainers, and members of formal project committees like Board, TOCs, Marketing/Outreach committees. Read the documentation for more details.
What’s New: Earned Media Dashboards
Viewing Insights Just Got Easier
We’ve cleaned things up a bit so that navigating Insights is now easier than ever. Now when you land on the LFX Insights projects page, you’ll be able to search through all listed projects, differentiate between project groups and individual projects, and quickly access project dashboards.
What’s New: Enhanced Search & Navigation
Easily Differentiate between Project Groups and Individual Projects
Project cards and dashboards are clearly organized between project groups (e.g., CNCF) and individual projects (e.g., Kubernetes is an individual project within the CNCF project group). Project groups provide an aggregated overview so you can understand how all sub-projects are performing or drill down into a specific project.
** Project Group metrics are aggregated based on the available data from onboarded projects. Read the documentation for a full list of supported data sources.
What’s New: Project Groups & Summary Dashboards
Quickly Compare the Health of Multiple Projects
Understand how your project is performing against the competition with the new Project Health Comparison Dashboard (Beta). Now you can compare multiple projects based on key metrics all on one dashboard. This dashboard is currently in beta, so expect new features coming soon.
What’s New: Compare Project Health (Beta)
More Ways to Filter Community Contributions
Understand who your most active contributors are so you know who to vote for in your next committee election. Community Leaderboards let you sort community contributors by a number of filter options, based on what activity is most important to you. The default view is “Code” commits data, but you can also view “GitHub PRs” and “GitHub Issues.” Or, select “All” to compare all data sources supported in this view.
What’s New: Community Leaderboard Filters
Want to Learn More? Join our LFX Insights Webinar
Learn how to leverage data-driven LFX Insights to make informed decisions about your project’s performance beyond the code. Join us on Thursday, January 14th for this first webinar in our new series.
Introducing LFX, Tools Built for Open Technology Project Development
BlogWe’re excited to announce that the LFX platform is now available, expanding the former CommunityBridge to provide even more support for the open source ecosystem.
Last year we released CommunityBridge, featuring early access to three community-focused tools: Funding, Security (limited features), and Mentorship. Since then, our engineering team has been heads-down developing new features and tools to support open source project development. We’re now rolling out 10+ tools with more on the roadmap for early next year and rebranding as “LFX” to align with other resources provided by the Linux Foundation.
Why We Built LFX
Open source has evolved to power more than 80% of the technologies we use every day, dominating in key markets including the smartphone, supercomputer, and public cloud workload industries. But as open source projects become the technologies that we all depend on, they require far more than version control systems or source control management to maintain and scale.
Critical projects must have their finger on the pulse of their entire developer ecosystem, with tools tailored to key stakeholders driving project development, including maintainers, contributors, community managers, and more. But it can be difficult to find tools that serve the unique needs of open source projects. “Supporting the tooling choices of our communities is in our DNA, but the connective fabric that can unify control and visibility across stacks is missing,” explains Shubhra Kar, CTO and GM of Products and IT at the Linux Foundation.
“We developed LFX to be the ‘digital glue’ that connects control and visibility across tooling stacks, providing a holistic context of project ecosystems–from contributions and release pipelines, to security index and end user adoption.”
Tools for Everyone
The Linux Foundation has spent years developing a proven methodology to transform projects into category leaders. LFX operationalizes this approach, providing a suite of tools built to facilitate every aspect of open source development.
Developed by the Linux Foundation engineers, LFX directly supports projects and empowers open source developers to write better, more secure code and grow sustainable ecosystems. These tools are a culmination of extensive industry knowledge and years of experience growing some of the world’s most critical open source projects.
Available tools include…
Like all modern software, LFX is built using open source code and is integrated with a wide array of different systems–from GitHub, to Slack, to Google Workspace. We plan to release much of this code as open source in the near future, allowing our communities to meet their own needs through collaborative development. However, we still have much work to do before our code is ready for others to dive into. As with many leading OSS projects, this process takes time and we want to get things right so that our communities can benefit. In the meantime, we would love your feedback on what you would like to see in the future from LFX and the Linux Foundation.
What the Community is Saying
LFX means new opportunities for the open source community. “LFX brings our vision to a whole new level,” explains Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director of FINOS. “It’ll give our community access to an even more powerful set of tools and insights, based on the world class expertise of the Linux Foundation and their years of experience managing the world’s most mission-critical OSS projects.”
Perhaps the most anticipated tools in the LFX suite is Insights, which will provide visibility into project performance and ecosystem trends. “One of the biggest challenges for open source projects is being able to define, track, and review key project metrics.” This is according to Jim St. Leger, TAC Chair of LF Edge and early Insights user. “LFX Insights is a fantastic tool that quickly lets people look at key project statistics… and is already becoming a great open source asset.”
But it’s our hope that the open source community will benefit from these tools as well. Students such as Animesh Kumar are the future of open source, and his experience as a mentee in the Q2 2020 Mentorship program was, according to him, “a learning experience of a lifetime… I truly encourage anyone who wants to start contributing to CNCF or other open source projects to participate in this program.”
Developers and sponsors of open source projects hosted by the Linux Foundation can benefit from these tools today. Simply log in with your Linux Foundation account and get started. Other tools, including Crowdfunding and Mentorship, provide valuable resources and best practices to projects not hosted at the Linux Foundation as well as the extended open source community. Find out more about LFX and the Linux Foundation at lfx.linuxfoundation.org.