Fueling innovative software
July 15-18, 2019
Portland, OR

A tale of two cities: Merging Yahoo and Aol’s open source programs

Ashley Wolf (Verizon Media), Gil Yehuda (Verizon Media)
1:45pm2:25pm Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Secondary topics:  Customer Centered
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 4 ratings)

Who is this presentation for?

  • Open source program directors and anyone who reports to the CTO, is responsible for license compliance, manages your company's content on GitHub, or wonders if your company needs a formal open source program

Level

Non-technical

Description

Every company needs to address how they manage open source. Verizon Media is the merger of Yahoo and AOL, and those two companies ran their open source programs quite differently. The result of bringing them together was surprisingly good, but the process to get there offers many insights into how you can structure your open source program office to address the biggest problems you may face.

Ashley Wolf and Gil Yehuda explain how Verizon Media now addresses license compliance, community management, the publication process, and how to run a program office at scale. You’ll explore real-world examples of things that worked well and things that needed much repair—as well as details on how it was done—and get advice on how to apply these lessons to your businesses.

Neglecting your open source program leads to problems. Ashley and Gil highlight some big ones, like when the wrong people have access to your code, license issues get you in hot water, and employees make well-meaning but incorrect decisions about code publications. Sometimes it takes a revolution to force you to step back and get a better hold on your open source program. But you don’t have to wait for a merger to force the changes. Better to set the processes right starting today; Ashley and Gil show you how.

If you don’t have a formal open source program office, or if you have one that needs a boost with some new ideas about how to maximize your value to the company, join this talk.

What you'll learn

  • Understand how a well-managed open source program helps improve your engineering culture in tangible ways
  • Learn how to leverage an open source program to reduce tech debt, improve hiring, avoid legal and security risks, and improve code quality
Photo of Ashley Wolf

Ashley Wolf

Verizon Media

Ashley Wolf is a principal technical program manager for the open source program office at Verizon Media. Ashley has experience in developer relations, customer engagement, and engineering community management.

Photo of Gil Yehuda

Gil Yehuda

Verizon Media

Gil Yehuda runs the open source program at Verizon Media. Gil has been a strong and vocal advocate for open source for many years and is a member of the TODO group. Previously, he was an analyst at Forrester Research focused on workplace collaboration.