Understanding the InnerSource Checklist

Chapter 6. Working Within the Enterprise: Understanding Planning

TL;DR

• Transparency needs to be a part of the planning process. Creating internal transparency has led in our experience to more than an order of magnitude gain in external code acceptance.

• Create formal processes to work within the enterprise environment. Formalizing processes keeps everyone on the same page.

• Transparency in planning helps because if the employees do not understand why decisions are made, they cannot propose corrections to the implementation. Top-down management is a complex process that rarely works. Open collaboration scales better.

The biggest difference between InnerSource and open source is the business structure and its constraints. Working within an enterprise means a constant pull of hierarchy and power structures that are often contrary to the basic ethos of transparency and individual agency that is key to open source. Yet, open source has much to offer the business world. So how do we adapt to the business environment without diluting the fundamental aspects of open source?

Keep It Small and Simple, and Engage Your Staff

Our biggest successes have resulted from finding and using a key point of leverage within the existing structures in the enterprise. We review current processes and find places to modify them in small ways to move incrementally toward InnerSource. We work with the business environment’s desire to work with hows and not whys, and simply tell them explicitly how to ...