managing-inner-source-projects
  • Summary
  • Introduction
    • Scenarios
    • Framework
    • Authors and Reviewers
  • Infrastructure
    • Basic Infrastructure
    • Comparing How Inner-Sourced Your Infra Is
    • Authors and Reviewers
  • What, When and How to Measure
    • Goals using Metrics
      • Use Goals, Questions, and Metrics
        • Goals
          • Reduce Duplication
        • Questions
          • Who Uses
        • Metrics
          • Usage Count
    • Areas of Analysis
    • Goal-Question-Metric Approach
    • Strategy
    • Examples of Interest
    • References
    • Authors and Reviewers
  • Governance
  • Tooling
    • GitHub Strategy
    • GitHub Configuration
    • GitLab Strategy
    • GitLab Configuration
    • Authors and Reviewers
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On this page
  • Governance
  • Technical infrastructure
  • Collaboration as cultural change
  • Financial support
  • Processes measurement
  1. Introduction

Framework

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Last updated 1 month ago

By adopting InnerSource methodology and principles, organizations get:

  • Effective resources management, with better code/knowledge reuse and cost sharing across the different units

  • Faster technology innovations/improvements, since the code is developed collaboratively and transparently by interested people and units

  • Empowered employees, increasing engagement by letting them to be part of companies development roadmap

  • Higher inner-innovation, by allowing employees to propose new ideas and implementations based on company’s technology/knowledge

But any project, even open source ones, need a framework that support them defining:

  • clear policies for contributors, to manage meritocracy (or do-cracy)

  • tools and communication channels

  • community culture

  • who pays it?

  • metrics and KPIs

Let's introduce the InnerSource framework.

Governance

A core aspect of the InnerSource framework is the governance model. Good governance is essential for the success of any project, and InnerSource is no exception.

Pick the right for your organization.

Technical infrastructure

By technical infrastructure we describe the tools used by InnerSource developers for their daily work. Usually, this tools cover:

  • Source code management systems

  • Issue/tasks tracking systems

  • Forums or mailing lists, and "questions and answers" forums

  • Chat or instant messaging tools

  • Continuous integration systems

  • Document/knowledge management systems (wikis)

Collaboration as cultural change

Creating an engaged community is one of the key points for open source projects success and sustainability. Same principle applies for InnerSource projects.

Managing a community is different from traditional development teams management, so project managers need to adapt their skills to the new scenario.

Open source communities are very flat organizations where leadership is usually more important than formal power. Companies adopting InnerSource need to adapt their organizational structure to a flatter one.

Financial support

In a perfect InnerSource scenario, and based in David Pink quote you should pay enough “to take the issue of money off the table.”

But we usually don't live in perfect worlds, and there are several scenarios where financial support for InnerSource projects are critical:

  • payment in different geographical regions

  • employees working in a mix of InnerSource and non-InnerSource projects

  • cost sharing between different business units with their own budget

  • projects developed by a mix of company employees and subcontractors

Again, open source provides some examples of how to get financial support for their projects, and organizations like Linux Foundation, Apache Software Foundation, etc. could work as reference, translating their "foundation" principles to our companies.

Processes measurement

Last but not least, if we are speaking about management, to measure becomes a basic skill for us.

Beyond collecting data, managers need to understand the goals of the organization and how the gathered data can help them to achieve such goals. They also need to take care of how they share that data with the teams, and what they want to achieve.

“Collecting data is only the first step toward wisdom, but sharing data is the first step toward community.” – Henry Lewis Gates (professor at Harvard)

Open measurement gives a lot of benefits for our InnerSource community:

  • awareness, it allows us to understand who we are, what we are doing, etc.

  • governance check, monitoring policies implementation

  • transparency, as trust generator for third parties and fairness for our InnerSource community

governance standards and model