Link Sharing

OSPO Contribution Strategies to Demonstrate Value

https://fastwonderblog.com/2026/02/15/ospo-contribution-strategies-to-demonstrate-value/

Many OSPOs struggle to demonstrate the value of their organization’s contributions to open source projects. A good way to demonstrate the value of these open source contributions is by showing how the work helps your organization achieve its goals, and this is an approach that I’ve used when working in several different companies.

Every leadership team has to look across the entire organization and prioritize the efforts that have the biggest overall impact on the organization as a whole. This means that if you want your leadership to continue to staff and fund your OSPO or other open source teams, you need to make the case for why your work is as important or more important than other efforts that are also competing for limited resources. Having a clear open source strategy where you can tell the story of how the open source work helps achieve the organization’s goals is a great way for leadership to understand the importance of the work so that you can continue to do it.

Clearly articulating the importance of your contributions to upstream projects should be an important piece of that open source strategy. This often has 2 components: 1) identifying which projects are most strategic / critical for your organization and 2) creating contribution strategies for individual projects.

Identifying Strategic Projects

When deciding where to focus your organization’s upstream contributions, I’ve seen a lot of people struggle with the difference between open source projects that are frequently used within an organization vs. the projects that are truly strategic. The way I like to think about this is by asking whether I could easily drop in a replacement. You might use a tiny library in a bunch of your products to make some task quicker and easier, but if you could easily replace it with something else, like another similar library or you could re-write it yourself pretty easily, then it’s not likely to be a strategic project that is critical to your organization. Something like Kubernetes on the other hand is an incredibly complex piece of software that could not be easily replaced, and if you’re relying on it to be able to deliver products and services to your customers, then this would probably be a strategic project for you. You’re unlikely to get much value out of contributing to that tiny library, but you might get value out of contributing to those more strategic projects.

When I was at VMware, I was responsible for maintaining our list of strategic projects. This came about because executives would ask which open source projects were most important to us, and before creating the strategic projects list, all we had to give them was the list of packages that appeared most frequently in our products, but this wasn’t what leadership wanted. They wanted to know which open source projects were most critical or most strategic for us. We started creating a list of strategic projects by talking to the product leads in our business units to ask them what open source projects they relied on and couldn’t deliver products to our customers without those projects. It provided a window for executives into what projects were most important and most strategic while also helping our business units coordinate with each other when they were engaging in the same projects.

Contributions Strategies for Individual Projects

This strategic projects list also provided a start toward justifying having people contributing to those projects, but it can help to dive into the details of some of these projects to look at project health, feature maturity, and other aspects of each project to decide where you might need to contribute. For example, when I worked at Pivotal, I was responsible for our open source strategy, and Kubernetes was a big part of that strategy. This was before the VMware acquisition of Pivotal, and we were in the process of making the shift from using Cloud Foundry as the base for our main products to using Kubernetes. This was a huge shift for the company. Pivotal was one of the creators of Cloud Foundry and we had a ton of influence in that project, while we were just getting started with Kubernetes. I spent quite a bit of time talking to the people in leadership who were driving this shift along with the people responsible for driving the individual product strategies with a focus on where we wanted to be in a few years. I also started engaging directly within the Kubernetes community to explore the different aspects of Kubernetes while talking to our engineers about which parts of Kubernetes were missing features or lacking maturity so that we could match what we were going to need in the next few years with the areas within Kubernetes that would need work if we wanted to base our products on top of it.

I used all of this information to create a written strategy that clearly tied our open source Kubernetes work back to our overall company mission and goals, and I was able to get people allocated to upstream Kubernetes by showing how our long term product strategies relied on specific areas within the Kubernetes code base, and outlining where we needed to make contributions to support those products. We then continued to track those contributions so that we could show the value that we were providing back to the company.

This was my approach when I was at Pivotal and later VMware, but every company and every open source project is unique, so this requires customizing your approach so it works for your organization. The CHAOSS project has an entire Practitioner Guide on the topic of Demonstrating Organizational Value with some additional ideas for how to demonstrate and frame the business value of your open source work. If you want feedback or help with your open source strategy and how to demonstrate value for your organization, I’m also available for consulting engagements.

Additional Resources:

Demonstrating Organizational Value and More about Demonstrating Organizational Value

A Strategic Approach for OSPOs

Using CHAOSS Practitioner Guides to Improve your OSS Projects

From Data to Action: Building Healthy and Sustainable Open Source Projects

Contributor Sustainability Impacts Risk and Adoption of OSS Projects

Photo by Ian Hutchinson on Unsplash

Digital Sovereignty Runs on Open Source

https://fastwonderblog.com/2026/02/07/digital-sovereignty-runs-on-open-source/

The tagline for Open Forum Europe’s (OFE) EU Open Source Policy Summit on January 30th in Brussels was “Digital Sovereignty Runs on Open Source,” which is in sharp contrast to last year’s tagline, “What can open source do for Europe?” At the 2025 summit, the conversations were about convincing those working in the public sector that open source was a good idea. Given the changes in the political landscape over the past year, many of those public sector folks seem to have shifted toward talking about what it will take to use open source as a key component in the EU’s digital sovereignty strategy. While we still have a lot of work to do, it feels like the conversations are moving in the right direction from why to use open source to how open source can increase digital sovereignty.

In my post last week about Funding Open Source Sustainability at CHAOSScon and FOSDEM, I talked about how open source sustainability was top of mind for me during these events considering the increase in maintainer burnout due to a lack of resources for open source projects. What struck me about the OFE event was how many people were talking about how we need to provide more resources for open source projects if the EU wants to rely on them to facilitate digital sovereignty.

In Dirk Schrödter’s keynote, he talked about how the EU doesn’t want to be locked into big US tech firms that deliver technology as black box, proprietary solutions. He mentioned that open source provides shared knowledge and skill development that leads to open innovation and lower barriers to entry, which is a key to economic prosperity. Dirk went on to say that sustaining open source software requires shifting spending to prioritize open source solutions, and public money should be spent on open source solutions. These ideas were common threads throughout the day that came up again and again in other panels and talks.

Here are a few other key points summarized from throughout the day:

I heard several people say that we should “never waste a good crisis,” and the current political landscape is an opportunity to re-evaluate how the EU uses technology, but speeches aren’t enough. Many public procurement policies make it difficult to use open source, and that needs to change. Procurement policies need to focus on open source to facilitate standardization and interoperability.

Digital sovereignty is about choice and the need to be able to switch between solutions to avoid lock in and create a transparent ecosystem to build solutions on top of open source. The EU should define concrete steps to replace proprietary solutions and transition to open source and use this as a window of opportunity to leverage what already exists, rather than reinventing.

Open source is worldwide, so there is a need to fund the maintainers and people who are contributing the code wherever they are located. Open source has always been global and there is a hope that we can continue to collaborate together, rather than being isolationist.

We need to all work together to strengthen and scale open source to improve sustainability, but financing and sustainability is a big challenge, and it requires investing in open source maintenance. Maintenance keeps innovation alive; it’s like plumbing, roadworks, and other infrastructure that needs to be steadily supported over time. There isn’t enough money in public budgets to make a big enough difference, so there is also a need for industry support.

There is a need for action now beyond the people attending the summit. The message of using open source to facilitate digital sovereignty needs to go well beyond the tech crowd to local officials across the EU public sector.

OSPOs can help put digital sovereignty and open source in context and facilitate collaboration and discussions between internal stakeholders, but also between industry and the public sector. OSPOs can help organizations take a more strategic approach by contributing to and funding open source, encouraging employees to take on leadership / maintainer positions, and increasing advocacy for open source solutions.

There were also two announcements at the summit. First, the Open Knowledge Foundation, Open Source Initiative, and OpenForum Europe came together to launch Open Technology Research to create a sustainable global platform for research, knowledge exchange, and policy engagement around open technologies. Second, the UN published the report from the 2025 UN Open Source Week and announced that the 2026 UN Open Source Week will be held in New York from June 22 – 26.

As someone who has been working in open source for a very long time, I’ll admit to being a bit bored at last year’s event with so many discussions about why we should use open source, since I’ve been having those discussions for 25+ years. This is why I was so pleasantly surprised to see how far the conversations have evolved in just one year. The shift toward talking about what needs to happen to make using and relying on open source in the public sector along with conversations about sustainability felt like progress. There is still a very long way to go. So many open source projects are struggling with finding people, funding, and other resources to sustain themselves over time, so we need to continue to move from conversations to action so that the open source projects we all rely on will continue to thrive as even more people rely on them to facilitate digital sovereignty.

Related Resources:

EU Open Source Policy Summit talk recordings

The Impact of Funding for Sustainable Open Source Projects

Sustainable Open Source Leadership

From Data to Action: Building Healthy and Sustainable Open Source Projects

Contributor Sustainability Impacts Risk and Adoption of OSS Projects

What can your OSPO do about power dynamics, rug pulls, and other corporate impacts on OSS sustainability?

CHAOSScast Episodes on Demonstrating Value and Funding Impact

FOSDEM Funding Devroom – videos will be available for all talks

Funding Open Source Sustainability at CHAOSScon and FOSDEM

If you want help with your open source strategy, I’m available for consulting engagements.

Photo from the EU Open Source Policy Summit’s photo gallery.