Define EcoSystem Sustainability Strategy Process
tl;dr This issue is about brainstorming how we could do strategic planning to help us position the project for long term success.
What are our ecosystem objectives for long term health? What would help us build on our strengths and address our weaknesses to get there? What leading and lagging metrics will help us know if we are on the right track? Would aligning with a software foundation help, and which one would help most?
Coming out of a discussion about having CiviCRM potentially align itself as a project with one or more of the open source project foundations (Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Software Freedom Conservancy, Software in the Public Interest), a few people (Josh and Joe to start, others on the Community Council) felt that the objective of such an endeavour should be to improve the health of the ecosystem over the long term.
There are a lot of stakeholders in the CiviCRM ecosystem, it would be a big effort to do a full strategic planning exercise, and we have limited time and resources. This is about scoping what we might do, and with that trying to iterate improvements.
A typical strategic planning process would include exercises like a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis early on, likely doing work on our Vision and Mission, creating objectives to accomplish and metrics to provide on-going evaluation of how we are doing at meeting these objectives.
There are various ways to define what CiviCRM ecosystem health is. At a high level, there is anecdotal evidence that different partners are getting lots of business and do not feel that their business is suffering. This business drives the development of code and documentation that is shared with the ecosystem, as well as creates funds that go to the core team so there are various strengths in this evidence. On the other hand, there is a worry about the total number of sites using CiviCRM having stopped growing and even declined, which is an important metric of weakness. While there is cloudiness about what the two different install counts are reflecting from pingback data and SourceForge downloads, and why they might be declining, there is a sense that they likely are accurate as a general trend.
Here are some interesting links about metrics:
- The Open Source Initiative defines what licenses are open source. Here's an article of theirs: https://opensource.com/article/17/10/defining-metrics-strategy-your-community
- CHAOSS is an open source project sponsored by the Linux Foundation. Here's an intro article of theirs about metrics: https://chaoss.community/practitioner-guide-introduction/
- CHAOSS has various tools we might want to use to monitor and visualize community metrics. In a day or two this link should show some easily auto-generated metrics about CiviCRM's repos under https://lab.civicrm.org and https://github.com/civicrm : https://ai.chaoss.io/repos/views/repo/259056
Here are some thoughts about installs more particularly. In terms of performance metrics to evaluate ecosystem health, a larger install base is a good indicator of ecosystem health. More installs means more users, more eyes on possible bugs and for possible new uses and features. More interest in CiviCRM is one way of bringing in new user organizations with budgets to contribute to core CiviCRM maintenance and for the creation and maintenance of extensions, plugins and modules. A growing install base means that CiviCRM is meeting the needs of a growing number of non-profits, and thus making a difference in helping them achieve their missions. From the opposite perspective, the ability of CiviCRM Partner firms to make sales will eventually be impacted if the software is perceived to not have a strong future.
The Linux Foundation recently partnered with an open source project, SCARF, to provide detailed usage information (https://www.wavy.com/business/press-releases/ein-presswire/687304365/the-linux-foundation-partners-with-scarf-for-enhanced-open-source-software-usage-analytics/) . Through various efforts in the Marketing Committee, we are getting some of this already, but SCARF are a community that aggregates efforts on tooling that we could use. See https://about.scarf.sh/ .
To skim across some points that might be found in a proper SWOT analysis: Just because a project has fewer installs does not mean it is unhealthy. For example, Drupal went up-market and started targeting ambitious site builders. Despite a decline in market share for Drupal (https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all/y), the leading Drupal firm, Acquia, is a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for DXP 2024 (https://www.acquia.com/resources/report/acquia-named-leader-2024-gartner-magic-quadranttm-dxp), and is a maker not a taker (https://dri.es/balancing-makers-and-takers-to-scale-and-sustain-open-source). CiviCRM's excellent API, large number of integrations, and strong low-code / no-code tools in SearchKit and FormBuilder suggest it has an opportunity to do so as well through partners. But there is a threat that a lack of investment in certain aspects of the core software, like its accessibility and user experience, mean that it could become more and more perceived as software that is out of date.
This issue is a discussion space for what our long term goals should be as an ecosystem, or maybe, what a process is to help define that. Once we have a better idea about what we are trying to achieve together, it will be easier to evaluate how aligning with one or another foundation for open source growth will help achieve that.