Open Tech Strategies has a dual mission. Day to day, we help our clients understand how open source approaches fit into their strategic goals, and we help them implement those approaches. But over the long term, we also try to act at the ecosystem level when possible. The more organizations invest thoughtfully in open source, the better off open source as a whole is — and the more organizations will want to try it, in a virtuous circle.
For years we’ve been digging into the details of our clients’ operations, customer bases, and markets in order to help them recognize and act on specific open source opportunities. While this work is tailored to each client, we are always looking for ways to publish what we learn so it can benefit a wider audience. Our work with Mozilla on Open Source Archetypes and with the World Bank on their investment strategy for the GeoNode project are two examples. We’ve heard from open source practitioners across the field that these materials have been helpful to them (and we’ve received useful criticism and feedback — the sincerest form of flattery). Perhaps most gratifyingly, we’ve heard from internal open source champions at organizations that are still finding their way toward deeper open source engagement, telling us that having strategy-level materials to refer to helps them make their case.
Now we have a chance to do that kind of public analysis in a more regular and focused way. Starting this week, OTS will publish a series of blog posts focused on strategic concerns in open source. The series is kindly sponsored by Microsoft, whose request to us was essentially “help organizations get better at open source” (not a direct quote, but a decent summary). They were clear about the series being independent: they did not want editorial control, and specifically did not want to be involved in any pre-approval before a post is published. It goes without saying — but we’ll say it anyway, just to be explicit — that the views we express in the series may or may not be shared by Microsoft: please blame us, not them.
We’ll focus on the kinds of analysis we do when we advise clients: how to identify opportunities, how to make decisions about prioritizing and shaping open source investments, how to integrate open source methods into one’s business models and goals, monitoring and improving open source project health, and more. Our clients will recognize some of this material — our advice tends to be consistent over time — but much of it will be ideas we have not discussed widely before. We look forward both to offering strategic analysis to newcomers to open source and to engaging our colleagues in the open source field in a wide-ranging discussion.
Our first substantive post discussing “What Is Open Source Strategic Thinking?” is up. Watch this space for more!