Octobox.io: taming those garden fairies
This article first appeared on Open Collective, it has been re-published here with the permission of Pia and the Open Collective team:
Ben & Andrew have been working in open source sustainability since 2015. Their first project together, Libraries.io, tracked the most popular packages in open source software. They used the data collected to identify what we now call ‘digital infrastructure’ and to highlight projects at risk — the project still exists but they are not involved anymore.
These days they work full-time on their open source application Octobox.io through their company Octobox Ltd. Octobox is an application that helps developers ‘untangle their GitHub notifications’. Being able to sort through notifications like an inbox outside of my inbox (which I like to keep as close to 0 as possible), what a beauty…
The sustainability of this messy and outstanding community we call open source is very dear to all of us, Ben and I are both part of the organizing group of SustainOSS and Andrew runs 24PullRequests.com every December.
B: Which reminds me, I need to finish the second report for SustainOSS!
P: Yes you do, my friend… But for the moment: can you tell me a little bit about Octobox?
B: Like Libraries.io Octobox was initially Andrew’s reaction to GitHub’s solution being poor. GitHub notifications are like garden fairies: you might see them for a moment and then they’re gone. Octobox takes GitHub’s notifications and places them in an inbox paradigm, which means no more ethereal notifications. We add the kind of features you’d expect in an email client: archiving, filtering etc. and complement them with live issue, PR and CI status updates to make you more effective and efficient, so you can get on with your work.
GitHub notifications are like garden fairies: you might see them for a moment and then they’re gone.
Octobox is built for anyone struggling under the weight of notifications they receive, or for those who use a workflow centred on issues, PRs, comments and commits. If that sounds like you then you can get started for free by signing in at octobox.io (and installing the GitHub app for maximum effect). We’ll sync all your current notifications (this might take moment) then you’re good to go.
Pro Tips: If it’s your first time using Octobox then you probably want to clear your backlog: start by archiving all your closed and merged notifications — hit the pre-filters in the sidebar, select all and hit archive. Next you might want to merge all the passing PRs, especially those from bots: use the search and filter for `bot:true status:success state:open` (and pin that search in the sidebar). Finally you might want to triage new issues: hit ‘unlabelled’ in the sidebar, that should give you the right list.
P: Oh man, I wish I’d knew this before!
At SustainOSS we defined sustainability in a broad sense, to include maintainer health, community and financial sustainability. It seems like Octobox is aligned with that ideal?
B: Yup. Our goals for Octobox are straightforward: to help alleviate the problems maintainers have today, and to show — rather than tell — the world how we might create a sustainable future for open source software: by building responsible open source businesses that care for their communities and dependencies as much as they care for their profits.
P: You have three options or models for using Octobox: self-hosted, free public repository and a paid option for private repos. Can you talk about these?
B: Firstly Octobox is developed in the open under an Affero GPL licence. Andrew and I are kind of hard-wired to create software this way, it has a lot of advantages early on. A proportion of the initial development was supported by contributors at Shopify and GitHub for instance, and both self-host their own services, Shopify’s runs a larger database than even our public one.
Our goals for Octobox are straightforward: to help alleviate the problems maintainers have today, and to show — rather than tell — the world how we might create a sustainable future for open source software
Going back to our goals: we want to help open source maintainers maximise the time they dedicate (mostly voluntarily) to their projects, to make them more effective with the time they choose to give. There’s no way we’re going to charge them for that, so our financial sustainability relies heavily on paid access for proprietary projects.
Thankfully it’s no surprise that most companies share the same challenges as open source maintainers — an endless stream of notification spam — and they want the same things for their development teams — a developer workflow that works with the tools they already use.
Andrew and I like to test our assumptions by experimenting and proving them out — Octobox is kind of a giant experiment in that regard — our first research question was ‘do people want to support commercial providers, or communities directly’. So we offer the same access to donors of equivalent value on Open Collective as we do those who pay Octobox Ltd. through the GitHub marketplace.
P: What do you expect to see in the community vs enterprise options? What are the incentives for someone to choose one and not the other? I know this is the beginning, but I’m curious to see if you have any predictions.
B: It’s early days for us on this front but we’ll do everything we can to ensure that the service is split on public vs. private projects, so your incentives are to open source your software or pay for access to thing you don’t want to share. Our challenge at the moment is to make this a personal decision rather than relying on an organisation to authorise use of a GitHub app for access to Octobox.io.
My view is that companies like GitHub became successful from the bottom-up: developers started coming into work and saying they had to have access to GitHub because that’s how they worked together.
We’re currently looking for ways to utilise the network effects of developer communities to broaden usage and for ways to let developers use Octobox at work. My view is that companies like GitHub became successful from the bottom-up: developers started coming into work and saying they had to have access to GitHub because that’s how they worked together. So I can see us developing the roadmap — which is public and open to contributions — in that direction, making Octobox work better for teams and to build things in Octobox rather than reimagining GitHub’s interfaces.
P: What are you thinking in terms of governance for both the community and octobox.io?
At the moment the Octobox community is quite small, there are about 90 contributors, ten of whom are maintainers with commit access. Due to it being a small community we’re able to keep everyone informed about what we’re doing with the company and Octobox.io and we keep channels open for feedback. As we grow the community we’ll be more explicit about the governance, following something inspired by Elinor Ostrom’s principles for institutional design. I have a plan for popularising this approach over at tldrgovernance.com which you could call a pre-announcement of sorts :D
The main thing that we’re doing at the moment is playing both sides of the financial sustainability model. By being members of both the community and the commercial entity we are able to let the users decide who they wish to support predominantly. As a protection measure Octobox Ltd. guarantees at least 15% of its annual revenue to the community, forever. In time we’ll use this to support paid work on Octobox and to distribute funds the maintainers of our dependencies. We believe that if every company who builds their profits on open source software did this then there would be no open source sustainability problem, at least not as we have begun to define it today.
As a protection measure Octobox Ltd. guarantees at least 15% of its annual revenue to the community, forever.
P: Which types of projects do you think this model will work for?
We’re fortunate to be in the position that we are. We are able to provide a direct service for end users that they will (and do!) pay for. We’re in the same category of project as Sentry.io in this regard, so I would say that this approach is appropriate for any open source project with a hosted ‘de-facto’ public service, or the ability to create one.
P: Any last thoughts?
Let’s face it we also had the freedom and the privilege to be able to be able to do this. Andrew had the time to dedicate to the start of this project and — due to the terms of our exit from our last employer — we’ve both had the financial support to get Octobox to where it is today over the course of the last six months. I sometimes talk about a solution to the sustainability problem as ‘creating a system that’s not based on privilege and philanthropy’, for the moment though I think our responsibility as a community is to share the income that we are able to create through direct user-services today with the maintainers who will provide for us tomorrow.
P: Thanks Ben.
