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 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 predominately 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. You can see the charts used below…
LFX Insights has provided the Academy Software Foundation a great way to analyze it’s impacts, and at the same time find area to invest in to improve the sustainability of the hosted projects.