InnerSource: Breaking the Silos With Code

InnerSource is an idea by Tim O’Reilly to use open source software development practices in corporate landscape. This means allowing everyone in the organization to implement and propose ideas across organizational limits. By allowing this, projects can achieve reduced costs and time-to-market as well as promote innovation and better code quality. All these benefits are visible in many open source projects and it is all based on collaboration of large amount of people with lots of brainpower and knowledge. InnerSource can be done in many forms; it can be proposing new ideas, creating new designs, fixing bugs or implementing completely new things. This of course requires a specific culture and tools in the workplace to make it work. Here’s few of them:

• Open and relaxed atmosphere where the contributors and the maintainers can communicate well and publicly using the same rules
• Tooling that supports InnerSource. For example, issue trackers and source code should be available for everyone to see and modify. It’s a requirement that projects available for contributions are visible and discoverable
• Goes without saying but people should have will to learn new things and innovate outside team silos. InnerSource requires high participation to work