  Context and motivation: Contribution Management helps firms engaged in Open
Source Software (OSS) ecosystems to motivate what they should contribute and
when, but also what they should focus their resources on and to what extent.
Such guidelines are also referred to as contribution strategies. The motivation
for developing tailored contribution strategies is to maximize return on
investment and sustain the influence needed in the ecosystem. Question/Problem:
We aim to develop a framework to help firms understand their current situation
and create a starting point to develop an effective contribution management
process. Principal ideas/results: Through a design science approach, a
prototype framework is created based on literature and validated iteratively
with expert opinions through interviews. Contribution: In this research
preview, we present our initial results after our first design cycle and
consultation with one experienced OSS manager at a large OSS oriented
software-intensive firm. The initial validation highlights importance of
stakeholder identification and analysis, as well as the general need for
contribution management and alignment with internal product planning. This
encourages future work to develop the framework further using expert and case
validation.
