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Milestones & Challenges

Below you can find, sample milestones and structures that are implemented for the startups

Resource: 12 months is the standard length of the Open Source Mentorship programme. 12-month contracts are typically offered through the procurement process through the UNICEF Innovation Fund. The breakdown below orders the modules and adds context to what content is covered. More can be found in the UNICEF O.S. Inventory: Modules – 12- month Innovation Fund contracts.

Milestones​

Q1: Foundations​

This quarter focuses on establishing an Open Source project and laying the groundwork for future work.

Milestones:

  • Determine licensing strategy for Open Source intellectual property (i.e. permissive or copyleft). Apply an Open Source Initiative-approved license to a public source code repository.

  • Create READMEs (in English) for all public repositories. READMEs should include:

    • Overview of specific repo

    • Developer environment instructions (i.e. how to set software up)

    • Note how repo connects into overall product

    • List of any Open Source software used to create product (including tools and frameworks).

  • Create a public Open Source documentation with a corresponding public source code repository. Use automation tools to set up automatic deployments of HTML documentation site from public source code repository (e.g. with Continuous Integration).

  • Establish an Open Source quality assurance process. Explore unit testing frameworks for front-end/back-end software, if applicable. Document user stories and test cases for games, if applicable. Document data structures and algorithm decisions for data science, if applicable.

  • Identify a Code of Conduct for any public Open Source repositories. Upload it to public source code repositories. Create internal documentation for how to respond to a Code of Conduct report, if one were to be made.

  • Follow the Pull Request Workflow when contributing code into your Open Source repositories.

Q2: Structures​

This quarter focuses on building structure, process, and organization into your Open Source project and community.

Milestones:

  • MUST have a OSI-approved license distributed with public source code repositories by end of Q2.

  • Create contributing guidelines for all Open Source repositories. Explain how someone makes a contribution to the projects.

  • Create public tickets/issues that correspond to planned features and known bugs/problems with Open Source repositories.

  • Use a public project management board to track progress on public tickets/issues (e.g. Taiga, GitHub/GitLab Projects, JIRA, Trello, or similar).

  • Add either developer or user documentation to the Open Source documentation site. (Hint: Developer docs often include API docs, architecture or system state diagrams, or deployment guides.)

  • Advance Open Source quality assurance. Target 15% code coverage for unit tests, if applicable.

Q3: Entry Points​

This quarter focuses on building strong entry points for new contributors to enter your project community.

Milestones:

  • Advance Open Source quality assurance. Set up a Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline from source code repository. Set up checks or tests on new Pull Requests. Target 40% code coverage, if applicable.

  • Add ticket/issue templates to source code repositories for new tickets opened by the public and the core contributor team.

  • Create "Good First Issues" for bite-sized, low-commitment contributions for new developers to make to your source code repositories.

  • Establish a public communication platform for the public to interact with project development team. (Suggested: UNICEF Innovation Fund community forum.)

  • Add either developer or user documentation to the Open Source documentation site, whichever was not completed the previous quarter.

Q4: Graduation ​

This quarter leaves time to address any pending items from previous quarters, and looks at creative opportunities based on the context of a specific project.

Milestones:

  • Finalize Open Source documentation. User and developer documentation should be available.

  • Finalize Open Source quality assurance. Achieve 80% code test coverage, if applicable.

  • Growth planning, contextual analysis, and focused support with Open Source Mentor.

Challenges of Supporting Startups going Open Source​

  1. Within a cohort, expect only 20-30% are aware of going open source and 0% are aware of Digital Public Goods – after advocacy of the advantages of using open source within a cohort, 30% of companies may be potentially interested to explore the path of becoming a Digital Public Good as well.

  2. It takes patience! Sometimes it may take emails back and forth of many long threads – in this case, please do reach out to a UNICEF Venture Fund Team member who may be able to assist more efficiently.

  3. Understanding the difference between licenses, even after looking at the licenses that matches with their business solutions. Navigate to the section of the open source license primer in the guide for more information.