Hi everyone,
I was thinking about who we are answering the question of an OSPO MVP for. There are many scenarios but the one I think about is a person who is tasked by their organization to establish an OSPO. Most likely, this person has experience with OSS but to accommodate the many kinds of experiences that someone may have, it is easier to make no assumption and imagine we'd have to explain everything. Also, someone will find the explanation helpful.
For an OSPO MVP, I concur that the context and goals of an organization matters. Without knowing what the priorities are or where to start, we could enumerate jobs an OSPO could be doing, or a full-fledged OSPO will be doing after evolving from its MVP. The approach then is from this rather long list of jobs that organizations pick and choose what they want to start with - that's their MVP. That choice may be driven, as others have pointed out, by the OpenChain framework, the OW2 OSS GGI framework, or any other framework.
To build on what Boris said about there being different OSPO MVP configurations for different contexts, this could be the type of company: Large Corp, SME, University, Government, ... or different goals: consume, produce, steward, protect, ... OSS. For building our first OSPO MVP, we could choose
one context, e.g., European SME that is primarily consuming OSS. What are the first jobs that OSPO would be expected to execute?
I share below a list of jobs in the hopes that maybe we can use this to create resources for the OSPO Alliance. The jobs are grouped into buckets of related jobs. The list is certainly incomplete, can be re-organized, or otherwise improved. I'm sharing to advance our conversation. I want to give credit to my colleagues Lara Puertas and Daniel
Izquierdo who participated in brainstorming this list of OSPO jobs.
Best,
Georg
Job Group: External Focus- Represent organization to OSS Ecosystem.
- Take care of the OSS reputation of the organization.
- Manage relationships with other organizations like OSS Foundations, projects, and competitors.
- Collaborate with other organizations in OSS projects.
- Ensure exposure of organization to the OSS jungle out there.
- Manage a wide range of different projects.
- Support sustainability of OSS projects
Job Group: Internal Focus- Work with other departments and teams throughout the organization, including:
- Corporate security.
- Marketing.
- Corporate Communications.
- Legal Team.
- Work with a legal team to ensure license compliance.
- Provide a workflow and policy for releasing OSS.
- Provide a workflow and policy for consuming OSS.
- Education within an organization, e.g. about how to work in the open.
- Evangelize and do internal “PR” about OSS technology, practices, and policies.
- Help resolve issues around OSS.
- Take care of the open source way of working both internally and externally.
- Manage corporate risk associated with OSS projects - secure use of OSS
Job Group: Events- Attend events.
- Speak at events.
- Sponsor events.
- Organize events.
Job Group: Reporting- Report to upper management.
- Demonstrate success of OSPO initiatives.
- Prove to organization the value of good OSS Citizenship.
- Track the health of OSS communities.
Job Group: Clean House- Be the central place in the organization where people come for OSS advice.
- Do OSS Evangelism.
- Foster OSS contributions.
- Manage and coordinate staff within OSS projects.
