Most project leaders and governing boards want to add diversity and attract new members and developers to join their projects. The first thing people look at is project health. Whether your project is in its early stages or mature, there are three metrics all project leaders can start with:
1. Contribution Growth
2. Contributor Diversity
3. Project Adoption
Using LFX Insights, you can monitor and communicate these metrics to prospective members and share your successes with your community. Let’s walk through a few ways you can pull this information.
In Insights under ‘Trends’ for your project find your ‘Commits Growth’ chart
@sgupta - as the product lead, what would you add to best practices for attracting new members?
@Kendall_Perez and @Neal_Caidin - Are there any metrics or additional methods you leverage to communicate the value of your projects in your quarterly board meetings?
Open source is all about collaboration and we can all learn from each other. If you work with any open source project feel free to hit “REPLY” and share your thoughts on how you showcase the value of your projects with your community.
To me, memberships are at the tail end of the project engagement process. In fact, most times when talking with perspective members I tell them to go check out the projects and see which ones make sense for thier business needs before looking at a membership; this helps solidify the investment and ensure multiple areas are engaged in the company.
Having that conversation with the data from LFX Insights is extremely helpful. I like going into a call and saying “Hey, you might not have known this, but you have a team that has contributed a bunch to project X”. This can really help the person trying to drive the membership go back to the budget decision makers justify the costs. It also is a benefit for those developers, as they can be recognized internally.
Thanks @Kendall_Perez! Makes sense, just curious though… how do you communicate this to your board? Do you just include the number you find from Insights into your report or do you export say our ‘Contributor Growth and Retention’ trend chart from Insights :
It depends. For LF Edge, each project does an annual review to the TAC and they like to show these stats to the TAC when presenting their annual review. Most will just take the total number of contributors for the last 1 year and compare it to the number from their previous year’s annual review. For presenting to the board, we usually like to show the graphs as they are bit prettier than just showing numbers.
We also created a two part series on based on meetings we’ve had with Governing Boards- might also be worth reviewing for ideas. Governing Boards Part I
Great point @John_Mertic ! This is also a great way to potentially introduce our members to the value Organization Dashboard offers, where they can understand how their organization contributes to all LF projects.
I’m currently creating onboarding material for our members now.
