This instrument was designed to serve as a lightweight needs assessment process for open source security tools participating in Internews’ BASICS (Building Analytical and Support Infrastructure for Critical Security tools) program. The assessment was created by Dr. Gina Helfrich, Program Officer for Global Technology Programs.
Internews is pleased to make the Open Source Software Lightweight Needs Assessment available to the larger open source community for use in understanding the needs, pain points, opportunities, and strengths of open source tool teams.
This assessment was developed based on a number of existing resources. In particular, it adapts concepts from:
- the Internews Organizational Capacity Assessment (OCA)
- the SAFETAG Capacity Assessment
- the Linux Foundation’s CHAOSS (Community Health Analytics Open Source Software) project
- the Apache Project Maturity Model
- the OSS Watch Openness Rating
- and the URSSI maturity model for open source software.
Tool teams who undergo the Open Source Software Lightweight Needs Assessment should walk away with a robust Capacity Action Plan to help guide priorities for the project team over approximately the next year. Outcomes from the assessment can be used to develop grant proposals and a clear rationale supporting the project’s need for various resources.
The assessment can either be conducted by an external evaluator or by the tool team themselves. Two versions of the Internews Open Source Software Lightweight Needs Assessment Handbook are available (one “for External Evaluators” and one “for Tools Teams”), depending on which route you choose.
License: Internews Open Source Software Lightweight Needs Assessment by Internews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
Language: English