When looking back nowadays to the work done on diversity, I’ve realized that it has been quite a trip! My first approach to the topic was in an informal meeting with Nithya Ruff, currently at Comcast. She mentioned that the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo reached (as far as I remember!) 13% of women attending the Summit. And this was a great number if compared to previous summits as the percentage kept growing. But she also mentioned that they received a tweet asking about the current number of technical contributions. Then this is where we decided to have a look at that issue: have numbers, and try to produce some of them from a quantitative point of view.
How, What and When Measure Inner Source
We are pleased to announce that we are writing a book about inner source.
We have been collaborating for some months with companies that are developing this methodology to produce the software they need. They were pioneers who early on realized that inner source has lots of benefits for talent management, software development, and business improvement. And now others are asking us for advice about implementing inner source.
So we have decided to bring together all our knowledge about inner source, share it and ask for open collaborations. We want to do this as openly as possible. We are building it as a GitBook, posting each chapter and asking for reviews. We will announce each part on our blog. So stay tuned and don’t miss a thing!
Lessons learned when tracking OSS projects (and what Inner Source projects can learn)
[Extra material available at the Open Source Leadership Summit talk and its slides in the Bitergia’s Speakerdeck account]
We are all used to open source projects. Concepts such as community, code review process, continuous integration, geographically distributed contributions, community managers, and a whole myriad of terms and collaborative way of working are usual for all of us. And enterprises are learning from this open process. Those are changing the direction of their development models to a more open one within the organization. Initiatives such as the Inner Source Commons where companies such as PayPal or Bloomberg are publicly exposing their case, help others to deal with the usual problems they face.
Let’s meet in Lake Tahoe!
Once again, Bitergia has been invited to participate in the Linux Foundation Open Source Leadership Summit (previously known as Linux Foundation Collaborative Summit). This time, we have new things to show, based in the work we are doing currently for The Linux Foundation and several of its collaborative projects such OPNFV, CNCF, OCI, Xen and Cloud Foundry (details to be published soon!).
Our colleagues Daniel Izquierdo and Jesus M. González Barahona will be participating in the following talks:
- Diversity in Open Source Projects together with Susan Wu from Midokura and Nicole Rutherford from Intel, on Tuesday 14th, 1:45pm – 2:15pm
- Technical Debt for Linux-based Distributions: Estimating What You are Missing together with Paul Sherwood from Codethink, on Tuesday 14th, 4:10pm – 4:40pm
- Community Dashboards for Linux Foundation Projects: From Open to Inner Source Metrics, on Thursday 16th, 4:00pm – 4:30pm
If you are around, don’t miss the chance to meet our colleagues, join our talks and discuss about how Bitergia might help you!
Meanwhile, we have started working on ideas for next GrimoireCon and OSCON US 2017. Stay tuned or contact us for more information.
Open Source community tools for Inner Source projects
In a recent post we’ve seen how to set up Inner Source in your company is a cultural change question. Companies need to increase inner transparency, confidence and collaboration for breaking the functional silos in order to create a proper environment to develop software between motivated peers and enable code/knowledge reuse.
Open Source development communities use several tools for enabling collaboration and transparency. Companies can take advantage of them for their inner software development projects. Let’s see some examples from our experience tracking collaborative software development and helping companies in their Inner Source projects analysis:
Meet us at FOSDEM!
We are so excited about starting the new year with our contribution and participation at FOSDEM 2017.
FOSDEM is the strongest reference event for developers and geeks to meet and know the hottest incoming tech topics since 17 years ago.
In 2000, Raphael Bauduin, a Linux fan from Belgium, decided to organize a small event for Open Source developers. He named it ‘Open Source Developers European Meeting’ (OSDEM). From the second edition OSDEM became FOSDEM and every year host more than 5000 developers and Open Source geeks.
FOSDEM is our natural environment. We have joined it in a lots of editions and we are very proud to come again this year as speakers. We are also going to set up a stand for chatting with all our friends with special gifts for our community.
These will be our contributions to FOSDEM 2017:
Inner Sourcing vs commoditification of software
“The idea is beginning to take root in even the most secretive corporate cultures… Its power lies in the inherent social nature of the creative process. When developers are able to access, use and build upon what their colleagues are creating, innovation can really take hold.”
Phil Granof in Wired
As we detailed in the previous post, adopting Inner Source practices creates great benefits for companies such as saving cost, faster time to market and enabling innovation.
There’s no doubt that Inner source needs a different approach to project management but “hands on!” What’s the best project to start Inner Sourcing?
Software is becoming the core of most business, even the traditional ones. However it doesn’t mean that companies should build all the software they need, most of it can be easily bought or outsourced with low cost, in order to focus their efforts on their core business. Thus, Inner Source should help to add value to organizations running away from commodity.
This was the case for Philips Healthcare. Klaas-Jan Stol and Brian Fitzgerald in their article Inner Source—Adopting Open Source Development Practices in Organizations recommended to start with a seed project. That means, not starting from scratch but choosing an existing initial implementation of a software product or component.
Frank Van Der Linden, CTO at Phillips was responsible for and pioneered the setting up Inner Source within the company. He decided to start with a component suite of DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine) standard, used in many medical imaging tools such as x-ray and MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanners. Philips Healthcare has a product line for diagnostic techniques in Hospitals, so they chose a core business software product for Inner Sourcing.
Van Der Linden reports enormous business benefits using Inner Sourcing as a process for developing:
- Three times more product groups served.
- Substantially improved product quality (Improved feedback from product groups)
- Product groups find defects earlier.
- Significant time to market gains.
- Growing an active Inner Source community – Over 60% of the PH software community involved.
Philips and other companies running Inner Sourcing learned from Open Source projects, they understood how to align and coordinate efforts. In the next post, we will talk about essential tools to enable Inner Sourcing.
