Codebase stewardship
The Foundation for Public Code will only start auditing codebases for possible stewardship in summer 2019.
Through codebase stewardship we help public source code and policy code products become a successful codebase by guaranteeing their quality and marketability.
We provide the following for products, projects and codebases under our stewardship:
- Codebase auditing: code, policy and documentation quality assurance
- Community management: processing feedback and contributions, events
- Productization: branding, communication, refactoring for reuse
- Packaging, distributing official versions, compatibility updating
- Marketing, communications, public relations
- Developer advocacy, user support, end-user success, training materials
- Operations: project infrastructure, process management
- Legal: intellectual property management, trademark protection
Making collaboration across contexts possible
We provide these activities explicitly at ecosystem level – not at a national or city level – to make sure that context specific code or policy does not become a barrier to implementation. This means that we make sure that code is reusable across contexts globally.
For local implementations we collaborate with local implementation partners, working actively with them to both integrate effectively in the local context while simultaneously making it easier for others to implement as well.
Providing long term product sustainability
One of the biggest barriers to uptake of open source code is the unpredictable nature of maintainers.
Products in the care of the Foundation for Public Code have long term sustainability so that prospective users can trust there will be packages when they need to update their systems and that there will be someone to receive their pull request after the original maintainers have moved on.
We provide this sustainability in the first place by creating strong communities of users and developers that can take ownership of the product.
For new or existing projects
For new projects codebase stewardship can add value from the start of the development process.
If applied to the project after there might be some important considerations about how to transition and budget for that, we’ve explained what you need to do for this and what you can expect from us in ‘Codebase stewardship for existing projects’.
Before entering the codebase stewardship lifecycle all potential codebases are evaluated according to our criteria for codebase stewardship