Companies across the globe are setting up InnerSource programs, which leverage open source development principles and practices within the boundaries of the organization. InnerSource aims to increase transparency and collaboration within a corporate setting, which has been shown to increase software reuse and development velocity and improve a company’s innovation capacity and efficiency. Companies know how to enable engineers to share code and can provide them with the rules of engagement for effective InnerSource engagement and communication. So why are many companies struggling to make InnerSource a success?
What many companies get wrong about InnerSource is that above all else, InnerSource is a cultural transformation initiative—a change in company culture is required to make InnerSource a success. Developers and managers will not shift their behavior unless they understand what’s in it for them. In this insightful discussion, a panel of experts explain why so many InnerSource initiatives fall flat in this regard and offer a number of suggestions to answer questions such as:
This panel brings together experts who have extensive experience and expertise in setting up InnerSource programs in a variety of companies across the globe: Erin Bank, senior director of the InnerSource program at CA Technologies; Guy Martin, open source community strategist at Autodesk; Daniel Izquierdo, chief data officer at Bitergia; Jim Jagielski, director of the Apache Foundation; Georg Gruetter, social coding evangelist at Robert Bosch GmbH; and Klaas-Jan Stol, a lecturer in software engineering at University College Cork. Join in as they share their insights and experience related to InnerSource failures and discuss effective and realistic incentives for InnerSource stakeholders, ways to measure and communicate value, and the cultural change management practices that are needed to succeed.
Erin Bank is an advisor on engineering program management for the CA Technologies office of the CTO, where she drives both the open source and Inner Source programs for CA product development. Erin is also a driver of the Accelerator, CA’s hybrid-angel VC incubator program, where internal innovators receive support and funding to get new products into market. Erin has more than 20 years of experience building and executing transformative programs and solutions, with roles in engineering program management, product management, and technical communications in North America and abroad. Erin is a contributing member of InnerSource Commons and is committed to establishing InnerSource best practices with the community. Erin is also an elected member of the CA Council for Technical Excellence and has Lean Six Sigma and Pragmatic certifications.
Jim Jagielski is a well-known and acknowledged expert and visionary in open source, an accomplished coder, and frequent engaging presenter on all things open, web, and cloud related. As a developer, he’s made substantial code contributions to just about every core technology behind the internet and web and in 2012 was awarded the O’Reilly Open Source Award. In 2015, he received the Innovation Luminary Award from the EU. He’s likely best known as one of the developers and cofounders of the Apache Software Foundation, where he has previously served as both chairman and president and where he’s been on the board of directors since day one. He’s served as president of the Outercurve Foundation and was also a director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). He’s ConsenSys’s open source chief, and he credits his wife Eileen with keeping him sensible.
Georg Grütter is a social coding evangelist and developer advocate at Bosch Software Innovations. He cofounded and led the first InnerSource community at Bosch. Georg is a passionate software developer with over 30 years of experience. Previously, he held various positions and roles at Bosch, Line Information, the Zurich System House, and DaimlerChrysler. Georg has created two open source projects, XHSI and stashNotifier. He’s an avid recumbent cyclist and mountain biker who also loves photography and chocolate.
Guy Martin is director of Open@Autodesk, where he represents Autodesk to the broader open source community and works with internal teams to help accelerate their use of and collaboration with open source software. He also helps build InnerSource communities to enable better code sharing within the company. Previously, he worked to increase community uptake and collaboration across a wide variety of teams and projects at both Samsung and Red Hat. Guy speaks regularly on open source and community at conferences such as Open Source Summit, OSCON, SCALE, and All Things Open.
Klaas-Jan Stol is a lecturer within the School of Computer Science and Technology at University College Cork. Previously, he was a research fellow with Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre. He conducts research on contemporary software development methods and strategies, including InnerSource, open source, crowdsourcing, and Agile and Lean methods. His work on InnerSource has been published in several top journals and magazines including ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology and IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. He holds a PhD in software engineering from the University of Limerick on open and InnerSource. In a previous life, he was a contributor to the Perl 6 open source project.
Daniel Izquierdo Cortazar is a cofounder and chief data officer at Bitergia, a company that provides software analytics for open source ecosystems, where he’s focused on the quality of the data, research of new metrics, analysis, and studies of interest for Bitergia customers via data mining and processing. Daniel holds a PhD in free software engineering from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, where his research focused on the analysis of buggy developer activity patterns in the Mozilla community.
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