The purpose of this working group is to support InnerSource Program Offices (ISPOs) with materials needed to establish themselves, educate partners and stakeholders, and scale InnerSource in their respective company. This material could be directed towards senior leaders, managers, or individuals in a variety of roles. A lot of our work ends up in the Managing InnerSource Projects or InnerSource Patterns books. Check out our CONTRIBUTING.md for specifics on how you can get involved.
We believe that most training and teaching content can be shared across companies when those institutions share the same relevant points of context. While not every company is exactly the same, not every company is wholly different, either. For each challenge in InnerSource, we believe that there are a small number of ways of common ways to address it that should work for most companies. Our goal is to document these sets of solutions to challenges, make it easy for ISPOs to find which apply to them, and then to produce sharable, open source implementations of these solutions. These implementations will likely be documents, videos, or code, each of which is generic enough to be used across companies, yet specific enough that people in the company can leverage them to solve their problems without needing notable amounts of company-specific work.
- Progress over perfection — Even if a solution doesn't work for all companies, we'll still put it out there. We can iterate and add more to it later.
- Solve your challenges — Take the challenges that you are already solving and use this working group to get external feedback and sharing. We do not expect others to solve our challenges for us.
As an example, to the challenge of How do I sell InnerSource to Senior Leadership?,
this working group could ensure that there are video clips explaining various benefits of InnerSource from a Senior Leader perspective.
There would be different clips that highlight different benefits of InnerSource,
and the ISPO could select those videos that highlight the benefits that their Senior Leaders care about.
As another example, to the challenge of How do I show InnerSource KPIs?,
this working group could ensure that there is a software project that will produce charts of InnerSource activity from sources like GitHub and Jira.
The project could be configured in a (finite) number of ways, depending on varying setup of GitHub and Jira that affects that report views.
These two examples follow the same pattern - providing directly-usable materials that help ISPOs to advance their mission in their company.
To chat with everybody in the InnerSource Working Group, please join us in the #innersource-working-group channel in slack.
You can find our public meetings on the InnerSource Commons Public Calendar (recurring every-other-Monday). Add to your calendar and join us!
If you want to share details about an InnerSource challenge that you are working in your day job, please open a new issue on this repo.
To work with our Kanban board we need to add you to our GitHub team. Please file a join working group issue, and an Admin will add you shortly.
There is also a meeting every other week where we discuss work in progress and new challenges that we are working on. Find details in slack.
We use the InnerSource Commons working group roles to run our meetings. Here is our working group documentation site.
These people regularly give their time to the running of the InnerSource Working Group. Special thanks to:
- Russ Rutledge (@rrrutledge)
- Jeff Bailey (@jeffabailey)
- Justin Gosses (@JustinGOSSES)
- Guilherme Dellagustin (@dellagustin-sap)
- Micaela Eller (@micaelaeller)
Check out this presentation explaining the motivation, tasks, and goals of this working group.
Our goals align with the InnerSource Commons RISE goals.
- Design, prototype, and document an AI‑augmented InnerSource workflow showing how agentic coding tools boost reuse and collaboration, not replace them.
- Publish a governance, tooling, training, and promotion framework to prevent AI-generated throwaway code from replacing healthy InnerSource reuse.
Find us in the #innersource-working-group channel in slack.