The 2024 Open Source Summit – North America featured Russ Rutledge, WellSky Senior Director of InnerSource and Collaboration. Russ appeared with Ana Jimenez Santamaria on How Should Your OSPO Work With InnerSource? An open source program office (OSPO) traditionally supports open source activity in a company. Russ and Ana spoke on the similarities and distinctions between open source and InnerSource and the way that companies and OSPOs support them.
InnerSource is moving up the Gartner hype cycle and was listed first in the 2023 top technology trends. InnerSource is the application of open source development practices to internal software development1. Open source projects are run outside the company for the whole world, while InnerSource projects are run inside a company for participation only by employees.
Successful InnerSource application allows projects to be shared and reused widely, reducing development effort and increasing standardization. InnerSource also enables projects to receive code contributions from anyone at the company, ensuring that the project doesn’t become a bottleneck to those that use it.
Several aspects of WellSky’s support for InnerSource were highlighted in the presentation, including:
- A training program for new hires on InnerSource
- An internal InnerSource ambassador program
- Security and uptime policies for InnerSource projects
- Metrics and tracking of InnerSource
- An internal InnerSource project discovery portal
WellSky has applied the practice of InnerSource for years. We regularly have teams leverage and contribute to projects in the delivery of our product roadmap. This practice enables delivery of functionality in our solutions faster and safer by using proven code that already exists. Security and framework updates can be made in one place and then shared broadly, lowering the total maintenance overhead for WellSky as a company. These effects allow teams to spend more effort working on the unique features that matter to WellSky clients, rather than recreating code that already exists elsewhere at the company.
View the full presentation at How Should Your OSPO Work With InnerSource?
