As you might expect the Open Source Initiative (OSI) uses quite a few open source tools to support our work in promoting and protecting open source software, development, and communities—things like content management systems (Drupal), wikis (XWiki), issue tracking/bug reporting (Redmine), desktop sharing (BigBlueButton), membership management (CiviCRM), etc.

Not only do we use these for our own operations (you know, the “eating your own dog food” thing), but we also provide access to these open source applications for our larger community of working groups, incubator projects, and affiliate members as well, helping them organize, promote, and develop their projects and communities. Many of these tools are provided to us by the projects themselves, or by other organizations—our corporate sponsors or commercial supporters—that are committed to support the OSI and the open source software movement.

The OSI is also very fortunate to have an active affiliate membership representing a variety of open source projects and communities, from large projects we all know like Debian, Drupal, Eclipse, FreeBSD, Joomla, KDE, LibreOffice, Linux, Mozilla, and WordPress, to some smaller/newer projects just gaining adoption and growing community like AD Model Builder, Mautic, Mifos, OpenMRS, Suricata, and Xerte to name a few.

Recognizing how valuable these tools are for our own infrastructure and operations, we thought the broader open source community would appreciate learning how they too can take advantage of these great resources. To that end, we’ve begun a new, free webinar series called “OSIdeas.”

OSIdeas is a forum where the OSI community of affiliate members, sponsors, and supporters can share their good work—projects, practices, and people. Our goals are:

• To share and promote the wide variety of initiatives underway throughout the open source community in order to increase awareness and adoption;
• To foster greater participation and collaboration among projects needing—and developing—similar tools, technologies and teams; and
• To highlight the tools and services used by the OSI and available to affiliate members as well as our working groups and incubator projects.

If you’re a member of an open source project and would like to learn more about open source tools that can help you organize your project, create and cultivate community as well as manage your development efforts, we have a few “OSIdeas.”

You can find our upcoming schedule, as well as recorded sessions from previous OSIdeas webinars, at wiki.opensource.org.