Today we launch a free tool to help you understand the impact of your open source software contributions: Ecosystem Dashboards

Earlier this year we launched Ecosystem Funds, a way to support all your critical software dependencies. We packaged millions of the most critical open source components into a few hundred Funds, each centred on a language, framework, or package, turning a process that can take months into a five minute conversation with your CTO.

But what happens a year later, when you need to justify that investment?

We know that many of the organisations supporting open source today do so because of a few dedicated people, deep within the belly of their corporate structure, doing the good work of convincing leadership that it’s a good idea. These unsung heroes do what they can to justify their proposed investments across multiple departments and budgets. They point out to marketing that the sponsorship of a popular package will expose their brand to developers eyeballs, and they tell HR that hiring and retaining developers is easier when they know their organisation is giving back. But they rarely talk to engineering about the direct benefits of supporting open source projects.

Why?

Because it’s hard. Because the tools to do so today require you to understand both how and what to measure before weaving that into a story that matters to you. You need to understand how the craft of software development shows up, and how open source communities work together, to understand whether that community is sustainable, and what sustainable even means.

We want to change that.

Ecosystem Dashboards are designed to shift the conversation toward the benefits (and thus the budgets) directly associated with creating vibrant, productive and sustainable open source communities on which we can all depend.

Ecosystem Dashboards are designed to get you started quickly, to give you an accurate picture of where projects are today, and where they’ve been in the past, so you can justify the return on the investments you have made over the previous month, quarter, or year.

Ecosystem Dashboards is built on ecosyste.ms, the world’s most comprehensive database about open source production and use, but we’re not here to overwhelm you. Instead we’ve packaged each dashboard, containing a single project or a ‘collection’ into eight facets:

Productivity: How well is this community working together?
Responsiveness: How well is this community able to deal with the pressures placed upon it by users?
Finance: What resources does this community have at their disposal, and how are they using them?
Engagement: How well is the community distributing its workload, and is the community growing?
Adoption: How critical is this community to the ecosystem(s) they’re a part of, and how popular are they?
Dependencies: What software does this community depend upon, and how are those communities doing? Packages: What software does this community publish, and how popular are those artifacts? Security: How well is this community handling security threats, and what tools do they use to do so?

Ecosystem Dashboards are a free resource for maintainers, program managers, researchers and policymakers, supported financially by a small group of sponsor organisations like Open Source Collective.

👩‍💻 Check out Ecosystem Dashboards