On 18 May, our OSOR community got together to discuss the sustainability of open source software (OSS) communities in the public sector. With the ongoing update of OSOR’s Guidelines for creating sustainable open source communities in the public sector, our goal was to gather feedback from the participants on elements that could be added to the Guidelines. Webinar participants shared their experiences on the topic of community sustainability and shared insights on which challenges have to be tackled to build sustainable OSS communities in the public sector. You can find the recording and the presentations supporting the event at the bottom of this page.
In addition to these discussions, participants had the chance to follow two presentations. Koos Steenbergen, Open Source Project Manager (Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations of the Netherlands) and Johan Linåker, researcher (Lund University), shared their insights on the sustainability of public sector OSS communities and good practices to overcome the challenges that may get in the way of the adoption of OSS by public administrations.
| Johan stressed that the health and sustainability of OSS is essential to a secure and robust digital infrastructure. One of the central factors for healthy OSS communities is good maintenance, which cannot be left to individual maintainers. Therefore, public sector actors should consider what responsibility they have in terms of contributing to the maintenance of OSS projects. Additionally, public administrations are often challenged by a lack of knowledge of OSS, technical capacities, and financial resources. In his opinion, public administrations need support and direction on how they can use and develop OSS to ensure that it is healthy and sustainable. Lastly, Johan recommended public administrations to conduct a health assessment of OSS which should be integrated as a key practice in public acquisition processes. For example, this can be ensured by employing the Community Health Analytics for Open Source Software (CHAOSS) framework with metrics for health analysis and assessments, including the five focus areas: value, risk, evolution, diversity and inclusion, and common metrics. | 
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Koos emphasised that OSS enthusiasts in the public sector should keep three main goals in mind: promote skills and awareness among public administrations, improve conditions for the long-term adoption of OSS, and practice what they preach themselves, i.e. refraining from proprietary software when possible. To this end, Koos advised to focus on public tendering and make sure OSS is properly included and positioned as the norm. Koos encouraged the creation of small OSS projects in order to foster the development of connections between governments and open source developers in order to allow public administrations to learn from practical experiences. In this regard, the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations has developed the public sector OSS community website Pleio, where Dutch civil servants can get together to discuss OSS, share best practices and work together on making OSS the standard in the Dutch public administration. Pleio includes an OSS toolbox for the Dutch public sector which helps to get public officials started within their organisation. |
Following the presentations, attendees discussed a wide range of topics from how to approach forked projects, procurement best practices, to building public sector capacity to engage with OSS. When it comes to the governance model of OSS communities, participants highlighted the positive role of foundations, especially in the case of cross-border projects. Attendees also emphasised the important role of the recognition of coding work in the public sector work. It would be beneficial to the sustainability of OSS communities that the time spent on the development and/or maintenance of the software is considered an integral part of developers’ work. The recognition of developers’ skills, competences and engagement is a decisive factor for the vibrancy of OSS communities. Finally, the webinar discussions explored the need to spread the values, ethos and OSS culture within each community to avoid misconceptions on OSS and bring community members together. Those lines of thought could be further explored by the OSOR team in the update of the Guidelines for creating sustainable open source communities.
The Guidelines are still open for feedback! We would love to hear about the changes you would like to see made to the Guidelines, useful tools, and good practices that make your OSS community sustainable.
The presentations shared during the webinar are accessible below: