LFX Blog - LFX Tools | Linux Foundation

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

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

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.

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 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

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

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.

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.

BLOG

The Latest from LFX

What’s New in LFX Insights: Ecosystem Trends, Enhanced Search, Project Groups, and More