Notebook - OSS office at Adobe #

tl;dr: This post summarises what I learnt at the Adobe Open Source Summit last week about which aspects to think of when running an open source office. It’s mainly a mental note for myself, hopefully others will find it useful as well.

Longer version:

This is another post in a series of articles on “random stuff I leant in Basel last week”. When I was invited to Adobe’s open source summit I had no idea what to expect from it. In retrospect I’m glad I accepted the invitation - it was a great mix of talks, a valuable insight into how others are adopting open source processes and their motivation for open sourcing code and helping out upstream.

The first in a series of talks gave an overview of Adobe’s open source office. Currently the expertise collected there includes one human with a software development background, one human with a marketing background and one human with program management background showing the breadth of topics faced when interacting with open source projects.

The self-set goal of these people is to make contributing to open source as easy as possible. That includes making people comfortable internally with the way many open source projects work. It means making (e.g. legal, branding) review processes of contributions internally as easy as possible. It means supporting teams with checking contributions for license conformance, sensitive (e.g. personal) information that shouldn’t be shared publicly. It also means supporting teams that want to run their own open source projects.

One idea that I found very intriguing was to run their team through a public github repository, in a sort-of eat-your-own-dogfood kind-of way.

One of the artifacts maintained in that repository is a launch checklist that people can follow which includes reminders for creating a blog post, publishing on the website, sharing information on social media. Most likely those are aspects that are often forgotten even in established projects when it comes to topics like releasing and promoting a new software release version.

Another aspect I found interesting was the creation of an OSS advisory board - a group of people intersted in open development and open source. A wider group of people tasked with figuring out how to best approach open development, how to get the organisation to move away from a private by default strategy towards an open by default way of collaborating across team boundaries.

Many of these topics fit well within what was shared earlier this year in the Linux foundation webcast on how to go about creating an open source office in organisations.