There are some traits that are shared by successful open source projects aside from the interesting technical space they occupy. Those that grow (and last) give individuals a sense of ownership, openly collaborate on technical direction and peer review, and make it easy for new starters to contribute. They build a community around a codebase which often results in better quality and a longer lifespan, and do this while overcoming challenges of being geographically distributed and having members with competing interests and different personalities. There are lessons that we can take from Open Source communities to encourage engineering teams to build well together, with the end game being well-engineered, approachable software and a sense of satisfaction and growth for engineers.

1. Communities for Code
What can engineering leaders learn from Open Source communities?
@brettporter

2. Teams that work well
together

3. Well engineered, more
approachable code

4. A sense of satisfaction and
growth for engineers

5. Hats

6. Open Source Flavours
• Governance
• License
• Independence
• Size

7. The ASF
• Govern of merit
• Peer to Peer
• Consensus decision making
• Open, online communication
• Responsible oversight

8. Community Matters

9. Community Success Stories

10. Traits of Successful
Communities
• Onboarding
• Ownership
• Openness
• Opportunity

11. Onboarding
• Successful communities make it easy for new people
to get involved
• Documentation for onboarding
• Mentoring
• Attentiveness to contributions
• Low barrier to entry

12. Use Onboarding
• For new starters, and those changing responsibilities
• Provide the resources to get started
• Use common practices and tooling
• Provide access to those who can help
• Remove barriers

13. It’s easy to start with
small changes that
make your life easier

14. It’s easy to start with
small changes that
make your life easier

15. Over time, become
invested in the project’s
success and feel a
sense of ownership for
your work

16. A Shared Mission
Working on something that is important to
you, with other people who share that view

17. Encourage Ownership
• Responsibility for code from inception to production
• Have a mission, a shared goal for a team to work
towards
• Self-motivated individuals, empowered to achieve and
shape their goal

18. Openness
• Open communication
• Open decision making
• Allows inspection and participation by “outsiders”
• Improve quality by diverse experience and many eyes

19. Favour Openness
• Have a level of autonomy for an engineering team
• Have open peer review
• Spread knowledge and avoid the “bus factor”
• Use tools that facilitate openness
• Example: http://paypal.github.io/
InnerSourceCommons/

20. Open Source provides opportunities
to work on something important to
you and to grow as an engineer

21. Opportunity
• Contributions that are respected, recognised and
reviewed
• Learning to seek consensus
• Work with some of the best engineers in the industry
as mentors

22. Provide Opportunity
• Offer the same opportunities for engineers in their
work
• Give opportunities to talk about their work internally
and externally
• Grow engineers, but also attract and retain top talent

23. Open Source
• Encourage engineers to engage in Open Source to
connect with those communities
• Consider Open Source, developed openly for your own
code where appropriate

24. Communities for Code
• Onboarding
• Ownership
• Openness
• Opportunity
• Learn from Open Source
communities
• Engage in Open Source
communities

25. Drop me a line
@brettporter
brett.porter@safetyculture.io
brett@apache.org