Beginning in 2020, the LFN began holding an annual, anonymous Community Operations survey to gauge the impact of our work, increase transparency, engagement, and collaboration of our governance and operations. Feedback from these surveys helps to ensure consistency and visibility across the umbrella, create best practices, identify problem areas, and help us better serve the community.
This year’s survey recently wrapped up and we wanted to share some of the key insights with the community. While the majority of responses (80%) were from the technical community, we saw a wide variety of job titles represented and a strong representation of folks from service providers and end users. Secondly, we’d like to extend a big THANK YOU to all who participated!
Key Takeaways:
Order of preferred priorities for LFN in 2021:
- Deployment Focus
- Growth (Members, Projects, Dev)
- Collaboration (markets, OSS, SDO)
Survey feedback indicates a higher priority of collaboration across markets (e.g. Enterprise, other OSS projects)
Top 5 areas to increase focus & investment include:
- Deployment
- Blueprints
- Enterprise use cases
- non-LFN open source project collaboration
- Tech Writers, Content creation & Research reports/market insights
Additional Insights
What’s Working
- Significant progress on CI/CD
- High satisfaction with virtual events
- 11% increase YOY on time spent working with open source (11% of respondents works in open source 100% of the time).
- The majority of respondents (80%) indicated they feel LFN is meeting or exceeding expectations
- Projects with the most engagement include Anuket, ONAP, OpenDaylight, and XGVela
- Nearly a quarter of respondents rated LFN a 10 of 10 on Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Growth Areas
- Interest in exploring new, LF-hosted open source chat tool for projects
- Desire for stronger integration with Standards Defining Organizations (SDOs)
- Improve cross-collaboration within the LFN umbrella projects
- Collaboration outside LFN is important – top areas include LF Edge, CNCF, OIF, O-RAN Alliance/SC
- Invest in enabling use of modern SaaS CI/CD toolchains, where applicable e.g. GitHub Actions, Gitlab CI) About half the community felt that this investment would improve the developer experience for the projects.
In general, it seems we are doing fairly well, with a few areas for exploration and growth. Thanks to all who participated in the survey, and of course to the entire community for your ongoing efforts.
You can read the full report of survey findings on the LFN wiki, here, and below is a sampling of specific feedback.
“I am grateful that the LF organised virtual conferences.”
“Doing a good job. Just keep doing what you’re doing!”
“In general, the governance framework for LFN projects feels overly complex.”
“Please keep the image of a truly open, global and peaceful organization.”
“There are many issues regarding self service automation that are raised very often and still not fixed permanently.”
“Linux Foundation has a great opportunity to collaborate with standards organizations. I would like to see more focus on this.”
“More efforts towards edge computing and 5G will go a long way and also create ways to foster adoption and knowledge transfer.”
