With the end of 2021 in sight, and looking ahead to next year, I wanted to take the time to post a general update about the FOCUSED Collaboration project. This update will be on the brief side, with the promise of more in the coming weeks.

At the start of 2021 we had a plan for FOCUSED that included some aggressive timelines. The timelines were centered on Fall 2021 and our desire to have the necessary pieces in place to measure participation during the month of October, when Hacktoberfest is running. Specifically, before October, we needed to:

I was optimistic that we could get all of this work done, but it meant we needed to have everything go very well. However, we experienced some early setbacks that threw us off schedule and we never really recovered. As the pandemic continued to drag on, we experienced team burnout, some turnover, and virtual meeting fatigue. Which isn't to say we didn't get anything done - we were able to complete the OSPO Inventory this year. But it became clear in August that we wouldn't come close to hitting our targets, and so I decided to further delay the project with an eye toward restarting the program in January 2022.

In the meanwhile, here is what I expect to do between now and the end of December:

While I do not expect these artifacts to be perfect, publishing them will be the first step to restarting work in earnest in January. Going forward, I commit to pushing out monthly updates here, so that everyone has visibility into the project.

Events of this year have only enforced the need for collaboration and cooperation when it comes to sustaining our open source supply chain. I look forward to digging deeper into this research in 2022.

-Duane