In recent years, the global open source ecosystem has entered a new stage of rapid development, and many companies, communities, and individuals have focused on open source. Among them, some enterprises, communities, and individuals even set up special organizations for open source, or set KPI indicators for open source, aiming to promote the sustainable development of open source projects or open source communities.
When open source is linked to KPIs, the results can sometimes be unexpected. On the one hand, some open source communities or technology giants have gained widespread attention and support by setting KPIs in open source projects; on the other hand, some company executives blindly pursue KPI indicators for personal job promotion, and developed An open source project with no use value is obviously against the spirit of open source.
The picture comes from: gossip in the Internet
KPI can not only promote the rapid development of open source, but also make it stagnant and fall into a slow period of silence. Since then, people have started to think: Can using KPIs to operate open source projects or communities bring about sustainable development? What are the KPIs for a good open source project? What do users and developers think about setting KPIs for open source projects? How can an enterprise or organization promote the sustainable development of open source projects and avoid the change of KPI open source?
Obviously, the success of open source projects and communities depends not only on technical strength, but also on many factors, such as sustainable development. In order to realize the sustainable development of open source projects, it is necessary to ensure that the project has certain use value for individuals, enterprises and even the market, and can retain users and developers. KPI indicators should be able to measure the quality of the project, user satisfaction, community contribution, and user and developer participation, rather than simply pursuing quantitative growth.
For enterprises or organizations, to promote the sustainable development of open source projects, it is necessary to pay attention to avoiding the trend of "KPI open source". They should focus on the use value and community contribution of open source projects, and encourage developers and users to participate to ensure the sustainable development of the project. In the final analysis, the success of an open source project requires the joint efforts of developers, users, enterprises and organizations to achieve truly sustainable development.
How does the industry view KPI open source?
Today, with the continuous prosperity of the open source ecosystem, many companies and organizations will include indicators related to open source projects in the KPI assessment in order to encourage employees to contribute to open source. The two are related to each other, forming a form of assessment, and even evolved into a model - KPI open source. It insists on "what to test", is planned and systematic, and is the driving factor to promote the value creation of the company's open source projects. Its core idea is to continuously improve the performance of the organization and employees.
KPI open source is a phenomenon rather than a cause. It has certain inevitability and is controversial. For KPI open source, different people may have different views.
Supporters believe that by adopting KPI open source methods, the performance and sustainability of open source projects and communities can be better understood and evaluated, which will help promote the success and development of projects or communities.
Juan Pan, co-founder & CTO of SphereEx, said, "From the perspective of open source projects, KPI open source mainly focuses on the formulation and measurement of project quality; from the perspective of open source communities, KPI open source can be interpreted as an operation management strategy to build active or healthy community."
"Indicators are valuable." Zhuang Biaowei, director and CEO of Kaiyuan Society and former open source expert of Huawei's Open Source Competence Center, pointed out, "We should study indicators, develop indicators, and promote indicators, and hope to form a consensus on some key indicators in the industry. Consensus. For short-term indicators that are particularly easy to 'buy', we need to shape the influence so that everyone can reduce the importance of these indicators."
Dai Lidong, the co-founder of Beluga Open Source, is not opposed to setting KPIs for open source projects. He believes, “Many individual open source authors create power for love, and it is difficult to persist for three years. On the contrary, KPI open source has a minimum of various Guarantee is much more reliable than generating electricity for love.”
Gao Hongtao, a core contributor to Apache SkyWalking & Apache ShardingSphere, expressed his expectation, "We hope to formulate KPIs with real executors instead of delegating tasks from top to bottom. Joint confirmation and interaction are the core essence of KPI open source. In KPI With the help of the incentive system, global open source projects can make great progress."
Critics believe that KPI open source has brought some negative effects.
For example, some organizations may focus too much on the growth of metrics while ignoring the actual value and quality of a project or community. Some people believe that open source KPI may increase the competitiveness of projects or communities, causing developers and community members to pay too much attention to indicators and ignore the long-term development value of the project itself, such as innovation, collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Open source for the sake of open source, the participants have no fun, and cannot form an internal driving force. The author interviewed Li Hao, PMC and chief architect of the StoneDB open source community. He believes, "From the past situation, many behaviors that were forced to open source KPIs usually ended up with unsatisfactory results. Maintenance', or 'no community' sense of community participation is not strong."
As Li Hao said, when KPI open source develops to a certain stage, some chaos will emerge in some open source projects and open source communities, such as: some managers blindly formulate KPIs for job promotion, GitHub paid star earning activities, etc. , Some e-commerce platforms even have a gray industrial chain of paying for Star. In all KPI open source cases, we can find the following characteristics: numerical, short-term, ignoring the experience of community members.
Cheng Shaofei, a well-known expert in the front-end community and the columnist of "Re-Learning the Front-end", sneered at the KPI open source. He said, "Most KPI projects are motivated by some leaders who do not understand technology. However, open source is a matter of long-term investment, and a large amount of resources invested in the early stage will inevitably be withdrawn after the popularity of the public relations draft passes, and after the carnival, there will be only chicken feathers left.”
On Zhihu, KPI open source has also been criticized by many company employees, and we have extracted some popular comments. An anonymous user revealed, "In the actual investment process of open source projects, there is a bit of a 'chicken and egg' cycle. If you want to make efforts to open source, the boss is unwilling to invest more resources, and you can't see the rapid development. Increased income is difficult to be convincing. In terms of implementation, there have also been many short-sighted operations without long-term planning.” [1]
There is also a Zhihu netizen @Wang Xu said that for open-ended tasks such as open source, "KPI-style management" is absolutely taboo. It must fully stimulate the creativity of the open source team. OKR management should be clearly defined, and the key points to be achieved should be decomposed according to the goals. Results, but when inspecting, focus on what results have been achieved and whether they help achieve the goals, rather than deadlocking with the set "key results". [1]
What's more, the superiors don't care about the life and death of subordinates. When the company reaches a certain scale, all "performance" needs false projects and data support; the main reason for KPI should be that the project is not simple, the team business In a few cases, you really have to create problems in order to have no problems with KPIs. You rack your brains to think about pain points, and you don’t want to maintain them anymore after you get promoted in the end. [2]
Of course, on the topic of KPI open source, there are not only positive and negative views, but also some neutral attitudes.
Some argue that open source KPIs are a useful approach, but need to be used and measured properly to ensure it doesn't have a negative impact. A reasonable KPI can provide open source project personnel with a clear and achievable goal, which will help everyone unify their thinking, form a joint force, and better measure and evaluate project performance. However, unreasonable KPIs may cause open source projects to pay too much attention to indicators and data, ignoring the essence and creativity of the project, and eventually make the entire open source team turn to "KPI-only theory". Being deceived, ignoring people and superfluous, resulting in waste of resources, seriously affecting the healthy development of the company.
In general, KPI open source has both positive value and negative impact. It is not a black and white question, and the ultimate effect depends on how and for what purpose it is implemented. Organizations or enterprises should carefully adopt KPI open source methods, and make adjustments and improvements according to actual conditions to promote the continuous development and success of open source projects or communities.
How to avoid KPI open source out of tune?
"If open source projects fail, it's not because of machines, networks, or office space at all. The only reason they die is that developers are no longer interested." Eric Steven Raymond said in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". The participation of users and developers determines the life and death of open source projects.
Based on the real needs of developers, from the perspective of solving practical problems for them, instead of KPI for KPI, open source for KPI. So, how should an enterprise or organization implement a project to enable sustainable development, and how to avoid the problem of KPI open source misalignment?
As the saying goes, Rome was not built in a day, and so is open source. The basic process of doing open source projects mainly has three aspects. First of all, it is necessary to define a practical open source plan and pay attention to the problems and demands of front-line production users. Secondly, it is necessary to establish a complete and easy-to-use knowledge base to facilitate subsequent new communities to quickly get started with the project. Focus on the construction of solutions and successful cases, upstream and downstream ecology, localization, etc.
In addition, in the later stage of the project, there may be adjustments to the organizational structure, changes in the core personnel of the project, changes in the organization's emphasis on the project, and many other reasons, resulting in the inability of the project to proceed. If the project has been successfully supported by the community, there is no problem of subsequent maintenance of the project. But if the community is not enough to support, you need a decent "hospice" care, improve the transition of running online users, maintenance and other issues.
In this regard, Li Hao, PMC and Chief Architect of the StoneDB open source community, made a suggestion, "For senior managers, it is necessary to recognize the value that open source projects bring to the organization and society, which is worth investing in for a long time. For middle-level executives, There needs to be a correct evaluation and assessment system to recognize the contribution of its participation in open source projects to the organization. Finally, open source organizations need to respect every community user.”
To comprehensively promote the sustainable development of open source projects, we need to pay attention to the following five aspects:
Determine evaluation indicators: In KPI open source, it is necessary to define or determine evaluation indicators. KPI indicators need to start from serving the community and projects more, and minimize the organization's short-term demands for benefits. For example, KPI indicators can be set as: community activity, average response time of Issue, timeliness of Review; activity of external contributors; completeness and readability of project documents, upstream and downstream ecological integration, etc.
Guarantee project quality: The value and quality of open source projects are the foundation. An open source project that has no value to the industry cannot continue to develop. KPI Open source needs to focus on quality rather than quantity, which means paying more attention to code readability, maintainability, and improving project stability and security, which can be achieved by implementing stricter code reviews, automated testing, and continuous integration. .
Cultivate an open source culture: Organizations need to cultivate an open source culture and an open source environment, and truly implement the principle of "I am for everyone, and everyone is for me", so as to form a virtuous positive cycle and reduce the number of open source projects being "for nothing" by large companies. things happen. Organizations and individuals need to recognize the hardships of the road to open source, and put an end to the mentality of "getting rich overnight" and the practice of "killing the chicken and taking the eggs" to harm the community.
Emphasis on participant experience: KPI open source should pay more attention to the actual application scenarios and user needs of the project, and pay attention to the participant experience to ensure the long-term value of the project. If users or participants love the open source community, it will promote the continuous development of the project. Developers and community users should encourage participants to actively contribute back to open source projects, improve the problems encountered in the actual production and use of open source projects in a timely manner, and help other users in the community avoid pitfalls.
Emphasis on community participation: From a certain point of view, the open source community is like a miniature version of a "country or society", where everyone is social and connected. Community participation is an important factor to ensure the long-term maintenance and sustainability of open source projects. More connections should be established between open source projects and the community, so as to form a complete closed loop and provide you with a complete solution to achieve 1+1>2 .
write at the end
There is no doubt that it is a very approvable thing for companies to invest in open source, and it is understandable to evaluate open source projects through certain means. However, enterprises should pay attention to the long-term value of open source projects, and avoid requiring the progress of open source products based on project progress, ignoring that open source products are essentially innovation, not labor-intensive work. While organizations and individuals gain both fame and fortune, I hope that open source projects can maintain their original intentions.
What do you think of KPI open source? Everyone is welcome to have a lively discussion.
References:
[1] Zhihu: How to calculate KPI for programmers engaged in open source? https://www.zhihu.com/question/508045817
[2] Zhihu: Meituan ex-employee publicly exposes: KPI open source project is worthless https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/102621178
Reprinted from丨ITPUB
Editor丨Shao Kejia
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