Session: Identify and Recognize your Most Valuable Contributors
Ensuring the sustainability of open source and InnerSource projects is dependent on retaining talent and knowledge. Managers responsible for product development, engineering teams, open source programs, and communities all share the need to identify where the talent and knowledge is located in the developer community.
The approach discussed in this presentation is to identify talent and knowledge based on the contributions made by people to open source and InnerSource projects. The following tactics are informed by the work of the CHAOSS project. We will see how to use a network diagram to identify contributors who participate in multiple projects and thus serve as boundary spanners who transfer knowledge between people and align development efforts. We will see how to use an onion model analysis and leaderboards to find the most active and most valuable contributors in any given project based on the different types of contributions they make. Finally, we will discuss strategies for recognizing, sponsoring, promoting, and retaining these contributors in our communities to ensure the sustainability of our projects.
This talk is targeted at maintainers, community managers, and managers of software development teams that engage in open source or InnerSource projects. However, everyone is welcome and no prior experience or knowledge is necessary.
