Identifying your organization's top contributors to build a culture of contribution

Maintainer Management
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Howdy everyone, :cowboy_hat_face:

As a Linux Foundation Member and supporter of the open source community, it is important to understand the following:

  • Your organizational impact and influence in projects critical to your business needs

  • Your company presence in communities of importance

  • Your organization’s overall participation in open source, across departments and divisions

Building a culture of employees that actively contribute code to projects increases both impact, and brand recognition. Identifying your top contributing employees allows us to reward hard workers in our organization, and encourages a culture of open source contribution.

LFX Organization Dashboard allows us to understand our organization’s contribution data over all LF hosted open source projects.

In this recipe we will walk you through:

  • How to access LFX Organization Dashboard

  • Where to locate your Top Contributor metrics

  • How to drill down into contributing projects

Let’s cultivate!..

Step 1: Access Organization Dashboard

To access Organization Dashboard you need to have a Linux Foundation Community Profile If you do not have one, you can create one here, on the LFX Homepage:

Once you have logged in to your Community Profile you can access PCC using the following here at https://myorg.lfx.dev

Step 2: Locate your Organization

In the main view of the LFX Organization Dashboard tool, find the ‘Search Organizations’ field in the left-hand navigation and search for your organization(s).

Step 3 Identify your top overall contributors:

When you are viewing the main dashboard for your Organization you will see information regarding your memberships and projects your employees are contributing to.

Scroll down to view your organization’s top contributions.

Here you gain a high-level understanding of your organization’s top project contributions and your organization’s top contributor across all of the projects staff has contributed to (membership and non-membership projects), next we will cover how to identify at a project level.

Step 4: Analyze contributions at project level

In addition to identifying top contributors overall, you will want to understand contributions to business-critical projects. Let’s dig into this:

Over in the ‘Projects My Organization Contributes Code To’ view, identify a project of interest and click the ‘View Details’ button.

Step 5: View your organization’s project contributions

You will be redirected to the projects page, where you will find aggregated data on your organization’s contributions over a selected time period.

Here you can benchmark your organization’s contributions against all other contributing organizations or any desired organization by various technical factors, such as:

  • Commits

  • Lines of Code changed

  • Total active employees etc.

441×512 52.1 KB

Note:

To filter your contributions data by time select your desired timeframe using the bar shown below above the charts.

Step 6: Identify your organization’s top project contributors

Select the ‘Project Contributors’ tab to view your employees contributing

On the ‘Project Contributors’ page you can:

  • Filter your organization’s top contributors for that project by time

  • Sort top contributors by the type of contribution (commits, pull requests, issues, email messages, chat messages, or all)

  • Recognize those that drive your open source priorities!

Step 7: Recognize and Reward:

Identifying top technical contributors in your organization allows us to understand our organization’s impact, participation, influence, and brand presence in the community… Building a culture that incentivizes active participation in projects helps us continually improve these outcomes.

With this information here are some ways we can cultivate a culture of employees that contribute:

  • Reach out to your team to thank and reward the top contributors

  • Ask top contributors to perform brown bag training in your organization.

  • Identify top contributing employees to send to events

Were you able to locate your organization’s top contributors?

What are some additional ways we can encourage building a culture of active contribution in our organizations?

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I have found it is helpful to publish contribution statistics internally, often in a “push” manner (email, chat, cadence calls) but, you can also capture in wikis or standing reports.

It has also helped to provide a succinct summary of what the contributions provide in terms of capabilities and features. It is one thing to know “X” contributions were made, but the value is more apparent when people understand that “Last month [John Doe] of the platform team contributed [critical capability] to the Kubernetes codebase”

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Hi @Henry_Quaye, thank you so much for writing this article and @anon9748504 for providing the quote I have highlighted from your comment. This is absolute gold.

Right now I’m on an exploration of LFX and love the technical deep dive this community forum is providing. I also like the idea of exploring the questions that communities need to answer.

Inspired by this post, I have created the topic, " What are the questions and answers that maintainers, contributors and organisations need to know?"

Feel free to join me on the journey or add your own learnings and experiences to the post.

Speak soon,

James :rocket:

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Hi @James_McLeod and welcome to the community :partying_face: :guitar:

Just joined and already adding value with a great question!

Exploring LFX is the beginning of a beautiful journey of understanding and utilizing various beneficial features, to solve various questions, for varying participants. :star_struck:

Essentially that is the reasoning for these posts we call “recipes”. Please feel free to ask any question you may come across regarding any of the tools in our Tool Help Category.

I’ll continue the conversation over in your post!

1 Like