Showcase the value of a foundation with LFX Insights

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.

  1. Contributor growth
  2. Contribution growth
  3. 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.

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Love this! Thank you for sharing @John_Mertic The Top 10 Organizations by Commits graph is one of my favorite charts as well.

I believe most projects assess health by Contributor and contribution growth as well as diversity.

One thing I’m interested in knowing is how would you prioritize or how do you currently assess the CI/CD process for project health, is this something assessed to your Governing Boards ?

Good question Henry!

I think it’s hard to tie health back to CI/CD, outside of if there are builds happening or not. It probably speaks more to velocity ( meaning how fast the pace of development is ) but even then you see projects with different development styles and methodologies ( i.e. some might work more on feature branches and then merge closer to release, others might work off HEAD, etc ).

I could see the case from a Governing Board that’s investing in some special infrastructure looking at the CI/CD stats and determining how well it’s used to help understand funding. Not sure what else…

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