InnerSource Summit 2025

In the AI era, your task isn’t just coding—it’s collaborating effectively with AI-generated code. Organizations face an unprecedented surge in AI-generated code, creating challenges around quality, review, and maintainability. This session reveals why InnerSource—the practice of applying open-source principles within your organization—is key to overcoming these challenges. Learn to prepare your repositories for seamless AI collaboration, ensure maintainable and context-rich code, and transform your team’s workflow to maximize GitHub as a collaborative platform, not just an AI-powered editor.

In FY2025, Mitsubishi Electric declared its transformation into an “Innovative Company.” At the heart of this transformation lies one principle: “No innovation without co-creation.” This strategic vision is built on three pillars:

• Business model innovation through Serendie, combining design and manufacturing expertise with on-site data to accelerate co-creation inside and outside the company
• Strengthening digital platforms, including cloud and generative AI
• Driving a broad mindset transformation across the organization

In this session, Yusuke Shijiki, Executive Officer (Associate), Vice President, Corporate Manufacturing and Engineering, will share the executive-level vision behind this transformation. Based on his strong belief in co-creation, he made the decision in 2025 to establish Mitsubishi Electric’s Open Source & InnerSource Program Office (OSPO/ISPO) as a foundation to accelerate co-creation both inside and outside the company. He will explain the background of this decision and how it reflects Mitsubishi Electric’s determination to put co-creation at the center of its innovation journey.

Mitsubishi Electric is evolving as a “Circular Digital Engineering Company,” leveraging its proprietary digital platform Serendie to collect and analyze customer data and generate new value through data-driven innovation. Yet delivering this value rapidly requires cross-organizational collaboration—something often hindered by siloed structures and a lack of co-creation.

In 2024, Mitsubishi Electric began its InnerSource journey, and in April 2025 established a dedicated Open Source Program Office (OSPO). This OSPO also functions as an InnerSource Program Office (ISPO), with a dual mission: to accelerate InnerSource adoption across the enterprise while building the cultural foundation for sustainable engagement in open source. Its role is not only to break down silos but also to nurture openness inside the company, preparing teams for participation in the global OSS community.

Mitsubishi Electric spans a wide variety of businesses—from factory automation to energy, transportation, and consumer systems—that may seem disconnected at first glance. However, this diversity represents a unique opportunity for InnerSource. By sharing technologies that are not domain-specific, we can create reusable building blocks across divisions. Many of these shared assets could also become suitable candidates for open source in the future. Since open source publishing is not yet deeply embedded in our corporate culture, InnerSource serves as a bridge: cultivating openness internally and creating a pathway toward external collaboration.

The OSPO/ISPO also works closely with the company’s R&D division to collect and visualize operational data, developing InnerSource practices in an agile, DevOps-oriented manner. This collaboration enables faster iteration, better feedback loops, and more effective scaling of InnerSource across the enterprise.

This session will be delivered by two speakers: Shingo Oidate, leader of Mitsubishi Electric’s OSPO/ISPO, who will share the organizational background, community-building, and strategic perspectives; and Kazuma Nogi, an engineer in the R&D division, who will present the technical aspects of advancing InnerSource with tools such as Backstage. Together, they will highlight how InnerSource is fostering co-creation inside and outside the company and serving as a stepping stone toward open source, aligned with Mitsubishi Electric’s corporate philosophy, “Changes for the Better.”

Open source process management around license, security and regulatory compliance is a topic that has been growing in importance over the past decade. The emergence of process standards such as OpenChain ISO/IEC 5230 (license compliance) and OpenChain ISO/IEC 18974 (security assurance) are two direct examples, but there is an even broader spread of signifiers across the IT industry. SBOM formats like SPDX and CycloneDX. Open source tooling for open source compliance matters. Regulations like the CRA. The question is how and why this all matters to InnerSource Program Offices and other parties charged with InnerSource strategy and implementation. This talk will expand on that.

Innersourcing is more than just accelerating code delivery—it’s about fostering a collaborative culture that enhances developer productivity and experience. This session explores the challenges and rewards of implementing innersource as a cultural shift, not just a technical one.

“We’ve implemented InnerSource practices, but how do we know if they’re working?”

This question echoes through organizations of all sizes as they adopt open source principles internally. While a growing number of companies report InnerSource initiatives, how many can effectively measure their impact? Many programs have also been cancelled due to the inability to demonstrate a return on investment.

In this talk, we’ll explore the surprisingly nuanced challenge of quantifying InnerSource. You’ll learn how to move beyond vanity metrics and gain real insights into collaboration, contribution health, and value creation across internal teams.

We’ll walk through breaking down what it means to measure innersource, share real-world examples from organizations applying InnerSource at scale, and highlight the tools and practices that make measurement possible.

Topics Covered:

• Why measuring InnerSource is hard (and why it matters)
• Key metrics categories: Participation, Contribution, Consumption, Community Health, and Business Impact
• Common pitfalls: over-indexing on Git activity, misinterpreting data, or measuring too late
• Case study: One approach to measuring what matters
• Tools and data sources: Git, code reviews, issue trackers, documentation portals, surveys, and engagement patterns
• Building a measurement strategy that aligns with your organization’s/ISPOs goals

Audience Takeaways:

• A practical framework for measuring InnerSource in a way that aligns with your goals
• Insights into how InnerSource metrics can support culture change and strategic alignment
• A set of actionable next steps to start (or improve) InnerSource measurement in your organization

Whether you’re an engineer, program lead, or executive sponsor, this talk will equip you with the tools and mindset to demystify InnerSource measurement—and use it to drive meaningful and valuable internal collaboration.

The emergence and explosion of AI, especially LLMs, will completely transform every industry. Just as the concepts of “OS for AI” and “AI for OS,” and in the DevOps field, we have seen the rise of “DevOps for AI” and “AI for DevOps,” a similar trend has also emerged in the InnerSource domain.

I will discuss this from two aspects: Firstly, InnerSource for AI, which involves collaboration within enterprises. The objects of collaboration are not limited to code but also include data, computing power, and use cases. I will use Baidu’s AI coding tool and its open-source collaboration within Baidu as a case study.

Secondly, AI for InnerSource, where we will highlight several InnerSource processes that can be improved through AI. For example, documentation and code reviews.

Getting started with InnerSource is never easy. My own journey began with frustration: I had published source code inside my company, only to see it remain untouched and unmaintained. I struggled with the question, “How can I involve others in this work?” Over time, I discovered that my company’s culture of cross-department collaboration—and my encounters with the global InnerSource community—helped me see InnerSource in a new light. It was during this process that the idea of a song and a character, the “InnerSource Hero,” was born. With my background of creating songs to explain agile and retrospectives in the Scrum community, I sought to make InnerSource approachable and inspiring through music. During three workshops, I learned two simple yet powerful values that many InnerSource practitioners hold dear:

• Publish what you create.
• Take action to gather feedback.

The day after I shared my song internally, I received the very first Pull Request to my repository. That was the true beginning of my InnerSource journey. In this session, I will share the origin story of the InnerSource Hero and explore the core values I learned from the practitioner community. By retracing these steps, participants will gain practical insights into how to overcome challenges such as reinventing the wheel or working in organizational silos—and be inspired to take their own next step with InnerSource.

Sharing Practices of Huawei InnerSource Office in the Following Areas:

• InnerSource Organizational Structure Development
• InnerSource Culture Development
• InnerSource Process Development
• InnerSource Incentive Mechanism
• Product Adoption Mechanism and Quality Management of InnerSource Software

The mindset and capabilities required for future-oriented engineers, and organizational frameworks for developing and leveraging these qualities. We will discuss building mutually beneficial growth relationships between engineers and organizations.

Open source projects consistently struggle with the same challenges: inconsistent code quality, poor documentation, security vulnerabilities, and low contributor engagement. The traditional response? Implement more metrics, KPIs, and OKRs to measure and enforce compliance. But what if we’re solving the wrong problem?

This talk explores why metric-driven approaches often fail in open source environments and proposes a more effective alternative: using behavioral science and experience design to make good practices feel natural, rewarding, and even inevitable.

Since introducing Innersource in 2022, we’ve found three effective ways to boost internal collaboration:

• Team-based efforts, especially by platform teams, attract more contributions than individual tools, aligning with Team Topologies
• Using GitHub’s GUI and clear contribution guidelines enabled even non-engineers to make direct contributions, such as editing content;
• Hosting internal “trial contribution” workshops lowered the entry barrier and encouraged wider participation, helping to build an internal contributor community.

Most engineering leaders agree with InnerSource in theory—but when asked to prove its business value, the answers often fall flat. In this session, I’ll show how we’re helping organizations move beyond “good intentions” by quantifying the real impact of InnerSource across cloud-native development.

At Aokumo, we built a maturity assessment tool that maps contribution behaviors, reuse patterns, and tooling maturity against industry benchmarks. More importantly, it translates those findings into measurable opportunity costs—lost developer time, duplicated infrastructure, longer onboarding cycles—and builds an executive-ready ROI narrative.

In this talk, I’ll share:

• What metrics to collect (pull request velocity, repo reuse, onboarding effort)
• How to calculate InnerSource maturity across multiple teams
• A real-world case study where one organization uncovered over 30% engineering time loss due to siloed practices—and used that data to gain buy-in for InnerSource expansion

The goal is to give attendees a concrete, repeatable framework to bring to their leadership—not just to advocate for InnerSource, but to show the cost of not doing it.

You’ll leave with a toolkit to assess your current maturity, pinpoint gaps, and communicate impact in terms that matter to decision-makers.

InnerSource is often described as bringing open source principles inside a company. However, this can lead to the misconception that “everything must be open.” It is also important to remember that InnerSource itself is not the goal. The true value lies in treating it as the most effective means to achieve greater collaboration, innovation, and impact.

The InnerSource Way emphasizes a more practical mindset: even without calling it “InnerSource,” it is about thinking how to create value for colleagues beyond your immediate team, starting small with what you can, and spreading your work so that it reaches more people across the company. As your initiative expands, gain your manager’s support to sustain momentum.

In this talk, I will introduce practices we applied following the InnerSource Way, the benefits observed, and the barriers faced when scaling, along with strategies to overcome them.

As we wrap up in Yokohama, we’re excited to kick off our in-person sessions in Berlin!

We continue our 24-hour global celebration of the 10th anniversary of InnerSource Commons. The Berlin segment welcomes participants from across Europe, Africa, and beyond to explore how InnerSource practices are transforming collaboration within organizations of all sizes.

This opening address will set the stage for a day of inspiring talks, community exchange, and shared learning. We’ll reflect on how far we’ve come as a global community, celebrate the diverse voices that shape InnerSource today, and look ahead to the next decade of innovation and inclusion.

Join us as we open the Berlin chapter of the Summit—where knowledge meets collaboration, and local impact connects to global vision.

InnerSource is often seen as a way to improve software development, but its potential goes far beyond code. This keynote explores how SAP applied InnerSource principles to the creation of technology guidelines and product standards — transforming them from isolated documents into living, co-created projects. The talk will share practical lessons learned, show how making standards collaborative increased adoption and alignment, and highlight how InnerSource practices are now even shaping leadership collaboration. Attendees will gain inspiration and concrete ideas on how to extend InnerSource beyond code into guidelines, standards, and leadership culture.

Each year InnerSource Commons releases a State of InnerSource report. Come along to this talk to be the first to hear about the latest status and trends in the InnerSource world. This year we will have an even more global representation in the dataset, with the survey localized for our Japanese and Brazilian communities. For 2025, we have also dug a little deeper into the benefits and blockers InnerSource teams are experiencing, and will share more details about what open source practices they are engaged in. Come along and be part of the conversation shaping the future of InnerSource and see how our global community is learning and growing together.

As organizations increasingly adopt InnerSource practices, understanding and measuring collaboration becomes essential for fostering productivity and innovation. This session explores the initial steps and challenges in quantifying teamwork by leveraging data from SCM systems, organizational, locational and legal structure.

InnerSource thrives when internal teams adopt shared practices that scale contributions, break down silos, and enhance collaboration. Yet in many organizations, InnerSource remains informal, driven by individual efforts rather than clear structure. Without defined contribution workflows, governance models, and shared policies, adoption often lacks momentum and fails to scale effectively.

This session explores how organizations can apply proven open source operating models to strengthen their InnerSource efforts. Drawing on lessons from mature Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs), the talk highlights how internal contribution becomes more consistent and effective when supported by structured systems similar to those used in public open source.

We will cover how to:

• Design contribution paths using onboarding guides, code ownership rules, and review processes
• Set up governance structures that support code reuse, encourage cross-team reviews, and build contributor trust
• Apply internal policies for project approvals, transparency, and lifecycle management to reduce bottlenecks
• Use developer experience metrics, such as onboarding time and reuse rates, to track and improve impact

For Inner Source to thrive and gain contributors, we need to make the experience as frictionless as possible. Often, we have built large frameworks around Inner Source with the intention of maximizing safety and governance, but these frameworks can inadvertently create unintended obstacles for potential contributors.
Let me share with you how we can address this challenge. We assessed the full process for contributing to Inner Source within our company, including all requirements and necessary actions. We analyzed and measured where people spend time in the process, and then came up with suggestions for cutting the red tape and for automating compliance topics.
Finally, for a smooth Inner Source journey, also from an individual project perspective, we need to make it as easy as possible to contribute. I’ll share some examples and suggestions here which can serve as a model for achieving this.

Behind every successful AI model lies an enormous amount of human effort in data annotation, the invisible backbone of artificial intelligence. Yet, annotation is often undervalued, siloed, and conducted with little transparency. This can lead to ethical blind spots, including bias, annotator exploitation, and lack of accountability. Culture shapes how annotation is performed, and without intentional cultural practices, even the most advanced AI tools can perpetuate unfair or flawed outcomes.

This session explores how InnerSource principles can transform annotation from isolated, transactional work into a transparent, collaborative, and ethically responsible process. By applying open-source practices inside organizations, InnerSource fosters a culture of shared ownership, peer review, open documentation, and collective accountability. Attendees will learn how culture, not just technology, ensures that annotation work is valued, ethically sound, and contributes meaningfully to AI outcomes.

Practical examples will demonstrate how tools and technology enable InnerSource culture in annotation workflows:

• Version control platforms such as Git or GitHub Enterprise allow labeling guidelines and datasets to evolve collaboratively with full version history.
• Issue tracking systems like Jira or GitHub Issues provide an open forum for annotators to raise ambiguities, flag potential biases, and seek consensus.
• Documentation tools including Confluence and Notion support shared standards, ethical guidelines, and transparent decision-making.
• Collaboration platforms such as Slack or Teams create open channels for discussion, peer support, and visibility of contributions.
• Automation pipelines like GitHub Actions and CI/CD validate annotations and ensure reproducibility, enabling accountability at scale.
• Through these tools, InnerSource practices address four critical cultural shifts in annotation workflows:
• From silos to shared knowledge, where annotation guidelines evolve openly so everyone benefits from collective learning.
• From invisible labor to recognized contribution, where annotators’ work is logged, credited, and visible, reinforcing value and responsibility.
• From bias to collective accountability, where multiple perspectives in peer reviews reduce errors and systemic bias.
• From isolation to supportive collaboration, where communication channels and transparent processes foster a culture of trust and well-being.

The session emphasizes that tools alone are insufficient. Ethical annotation requires embedding InnerSource values into daily practices. Even small cultural shifts, amplified through the right combination of tools, can lead to measurable improvements in data quality, fairness, and trust in AI systems.

Attendees, including AI practitioners, data engineers, annotators, and InnerSource advocates, will leave with actionable insights on how to apply InnerSource culture to annotation workflows. They will understand how collaboration, transparency, and shared responsibility not only improve technical outcomes but also create a human-centered, ethical approach to AI development.

Ethical AI starts with how we label, who labels, and the culture that surrounds it. By applying InnerSource values, organizations can make invisible labor visible, elevate contributions, and build AI systems that are fair, transparent, and accountable.

In this session we will look back on 3 years of implementing InnerSource in a government, what works, what doesn’t, some lessons learned (and even some which have resulted in change). We’ll start at the beginning, which, in this case was open source, and how developing also internally using InnerSource methodologies helped the whole organization.

InnerSource is more than a methodology—it’s a cultural shift. In this session, Red Hat and AXA share how they actively co-developed the foundations of InnerSource within a federated entity context at AXA, aiming to establish a sustainable, scalable model that supports both engineering and business transformation.

Over the past year, Red Hat with its Open practices experience helped AXA OSPO to set up and launch our InnerSource pilot at AXA. This initiative is not just about code—it’s about enabling strategic innovation through change management, cultural alignment, and cross-functional engagement. The effort involves not only developers, but also business stakeholders and management layers, recognizing that InnerSource success depends on broad organizational buy-in.

The session focuses on how we are applying and adapting established InnerSource patterns to our enterprise reality. We’ll highlight the specific patterns that have guided our journey—such as “Trusted Committer,” “InnerSource Portal,” and “Contribution Workflow”—and how we’ve tailored them to fit our governance, compliance, and collaboration needs.

We’ll also walk through our layered governance approach, from open committees to core groups, and how we use lightweight prescription to guide teams without stifling innovation. Balancing openness with compliance, and collaboration with control, has been key to building trust and momentum.

In this role-play session, grounded in real-world experience, attendees will gain practical insights, reusable templates, and a candid look at the challenges and enablers of building InnerSource from the ground up—especially in a moment where AI-driven innovation demands more open, collaborative, and resilient software ecosystems.

The rapid evolution of Generative AI is reshaping industries at an unprecedented pace, presenting both opportunities and challenges for traditional sectors such as aerospace. To stay competitive and innovative, Airbus is adopting new ways of working that enable faster experimentation, knowledge sharing, and cross-functional collaboration. This talk explores how InnerSource can serve as a strategic enabler for harnessing the full potential of Generative AI.

The Generative AI community brings new large language models, frameworks and workflows every week. It is too fast for a classical software development lifecycle in a company like Airbus. By fostering a culture of transparency, reuse, and contribution across departments and disciplines, InnerSource accelerates the development and integration of AI capabilities.

We discuss key enablers such as shared codebases, platforms, documentation standards, and collaborative governance, as well as the cultural shifts required to support them. Through illustrative examples and lessons learned, we show how Innersource helps Airbus keep pace with the transformative power of Generative AI while maintaining the rigor, safety, and compliance essential to the industry. We will also have a look at the demography of InnerSource contributors and their motivation.

“InnerSource is more than just sharing code modifications via pull requests”. When Open Source enthusiasts invite engineers to get involved in upstream open source they often think of sending code modifications - or even publishing entire projects on their own.

The catch: This is not what seasoned Open Source enthusiasts have in mind - at all.

In this talk we will explore what it means to start getting involved in upstream Open Source. How engineers can benefit from that. That they need a customer driven mindset to even get started.

We will draw parallels to what this means for InnerSource projects: Just how much transparency is really needed? How far do we need to cut back on sync meetings, in-team coordination and switch to a format that can easily be joined by contributors from all sorts of teams within the company.

With Berlin coming to a close, we now turn to our in-person sessions in New York City.

Internal boundaries between information systems divisions have traditionally caused friction and frustration, and negatively affected IT staff job satisfaction. Adopting open source development principles and processes within a corporate environment, what has been labeled ‘InnerSource,’ is now part of a larger management strategy to break down silos and promote innovation, collaboration, cooperation and communication across divisions of an organization. InnerSource emphasizes the importance of relationships between developers and teams interacting across intra-organizational boundaries. InnerSource helps to create social capital, which in turn links to higher levels of job satisfaction. Using a sequential mixed-methods approach to test a theoretical model by combining quantitative survey data collected at one IT organization with qualitative data based on interviews with professionals from six organizations that adopted InnerSource. The results suggest that employees who participate in InnerSource projects develop more social interaction ties with others and have higher levels of shared understanding of software projects. Furthermore, the study confirms that social interaction ties and a shared understanding link to a higher degree of trust. Finally, this study provides evidence that social capital mediates the link between participation in InnerSource and job satisfaction, implying that an InnerSource strategy can offer benefits to organizations.

InnerSource practices, inspired by open-source methodologies, offer significant value to organizations by fostering software reuse, improving collaboration, and eliminating inefficiencies. However, quantifying this value is essential to justify investments and sustain InnerSource initiatives. This paper presents a framework to measure the impact of InnerSource projects in the financial industry. It focuses on metrics for cost savings through reuse, enhanced time-to-market, reduced maintenance expenses, and improved engineering health. By leveraging automated tools, surveys, and analytical models, organizations can assess the financial benefits of InnerSource contributions while fostering transparency and collaboration among teams. This approach provides actionable insights to drive strategic decisions and optimize software development processes.

During this session, we will discuss the methodologies for extracting and analyzing InnerSource practitioner interactions, such as pull requests, code reviews, and commit activity. We will explore how these interactions can be mapped onto the organizational structure to identify key collaborators and potential bottlenecks.

We begin the final chapter of our 24-hour global celebration marking the 10th anniversary of InnerSource Commons. The New York segment brings together voices from across North and South America to explore how InnerSource is driving innovation, breaking silos, and empowering teams to collaborate openly within their organizations.

This opening address will welcome participants to a day filled with inspiring talks, practical insights, and community connections. We’ll reflect on the global journey that began in Yokohama, continued through Berlin, and now culminates here in New York—celebrating the shared principles that unite us across continents.

Join us as we open the New York portion of the Summit and look ahead to the future of InnerSource—rooted in openness, collaboration, and a shared commitment to building better together.

IBM has been in AI for decades, but our early AI technology was built in silos, making it hard to gain market relevance. When generative AI exploded, the company faced a choice: learn to collaborate or become irrelevant. We’ll talk about how we rebuilt our collaboration infrastructure using InnerSource as a bridge to open source, making our best strategic technology available to all our developers. And in the end, we’ll answer the question: will human collaboration survive the age of AI

At IBM, we didn’t just scale InnerSource, we rewired a collective mindset around how collaboration and open innovation happens. The IBM InnerSource journey started in 2019 with a simple but urgent challenge: unify over 30 fragmented NLP stacks. What followed was a multi-year transformation that turned isolated innovation into a reusable, enterprise-wide AI platform that we called Watson Core. We did this, not by throwing more tools at the problem, but by investing in making processes better and building tools that made collaboration and reuse easy.

But the real breakthrough wasn’t technical. It was human.

Heading into 2022 the IBM CIO decided to invest in building a people-first infrastructure by forming an InnerSource Program Office (ISPO) with the mission to build a consistent governance framework, platform of common tools and playbook of InnerSource practices as an InnerSource@IBM ‘how to’ manual that would establish the connective tissue for aligning architects, developers, product teams, leadership and more, by grounding them in cultural practices of consistency, repeatability, reusability and community collaboration.

By the end of 2022, InnerSource@IBM had grown and matured into a robust global community that was breaking down communication barriers and knowledge silos via participation in an education curriculum for InnerSource Practitioners@IBM, following the framework in InnerSource@IBM Program Guide and using InnerSource@IBM Platform tools provided by the newly formed ISPO.

In 2023, ownership of the ISPO was transitioned from IBM CIO to IBM Research to enable researchers to upskill on InnerSource@IBM practices, transform IBM’s Academy of Technology (AoT) and create a scalable, open innovation pipeline of research assets as a fast-track into products, which ultimately led to watsonx launch at IBM’s 2023 Think conference. Throughout 2023 and 2024 the ISPO enabled IBM’s AI foundation model teams and scientific contributors to begin working side-by-side with product engineers, using InnerSource@IBM as the scaffolding between experimentation and deployment.

By 2024 InnerSource@IBM was firmly established as a research accelerator with ISPO support of AoT’s transformation into the Open Innovation Community (OIC), successful transition of IBM’s granite models to open source and InstructLab’s announcement at Think in 2024.

The IBM InnerSource story isn’t about only AI or code, productivity or ROI. It’s about building a culture of trust where researchers, engineers, and product teams share knowledge instead of hording information. Co-create instead of compete. Where contribution is rewarded, acknowledged and celebrated.

In this session we will tell An IBM InnerSource Story where participants will join a quest to understand why designing a scaffolding for humans by humans makes scalable innovation a reality. Our intent for sharing this story is to offer a roadmap for anyone who wants to build a future of innovation that isn’t just technical, it’s about improving our collective human experience. Afterall, we are people not robots.

Last year, Shell deployed an Open Source AI-Powered Discovery Tool - Project Fleming - to facilitate the process of code discovery within organisations. What developments have occurred since then? What new open source tools will be available shortly? Join us to find out.

InnerSource has been quietly shaping engineering culture for years -laying the groundwork for collaboration, reuse, and autonomy across teams. More recently, platform engineering has emerged with a similar mission, but from a different angle. Though their paths have long run in parallel, the connection between them has often been under-explored. In this session, we’ll reflect on how these two disciplines are beginning to converge, explore the shared principles that underpin their success, and consider how their reunion is reshaping the way teams collaborate, build, and share. This isn’t a deep dive into tools or implementation, but an invitation to rethink boundaries - and perhaps rediscover what’s been hiding in plain sight.

Agentic AI tools are transforming how software is created — moving from code generation on request to systems that can plan, act, and collaborate. In this new environment, InnerSource isn’t just a code repository; it becomes the trusted backbone for both humans and AI to work together effectively. By curating high-value components, enterprise guardrails, and shared knowledge, InnerSource empowers AI agents to produce better results while enabling humans to guide, review, and make final decisions.

This session explores how to adapt InnerSource for the AI era — from sharing rules and governance as reusable assets, to improving repository clarity and lowering friction for contribution, to using AI as a co-maintainer that supports, rather than replaces, human judgment. You’ll see how the right mix of automation and human oversight can accelerate innovation, maintain enterprise standards, and keep collaboration at the heart of the process.

Adopting InnerSource culture is transforming how productive and effective businesses can be. Embracing InnerSource has reduced internal duplication of efforts, is building a strong internal incubator for features and products, and helping model what joint customer communities could look like. Join us to discuss various lessons learned and repeatable patterns we have used for a successful InnerSource adoption. We will share successful project stories, project security considerations, and other tips.

Learn how to make resource limitations a catalyst for creativity and collaboration. Let’s tune constraints into innovation for teams short on resources. It’s all about open, collaborative development and community focus. These aren’t just open-source buzzwords; they’re the core of a strategy to boost innovation and efficiency, even when resources are tight.We’ll tackle the big hurdles: limited staffing, tight budgets, and pressing deadlines. How? By embracing InnerSource. Think flexible project management, shared code repositories, and cross-team collaboration. Let’s learn to make the most of what we have.

InnerSource is often described as a cultural change, but in my work I’ve learned it also requires strong technical foundations. At Credicorp, the largest financial holding in Peru, with more than 10 companies and over 8,000 developers, we set out to introduce InnerSource in an environment that is both highly regulated and driven by strict quality standards. One of the most important steps was connecting several GitHub Enterprise Cloud (GHEC) instances across the group. This gave us the base to share code, enable contributions between subsidiaries, and reduce duplicated effort—while keeping the controls needed for compliance and security.

In this session, I will share what this journey looked like from the technical side:

• The InnerSource patterns that helped us (Trusted Committers, Contribution Workflow, Documentation First, InnerSource Portals).
• The architecture we built around GHEC, CI/CD, and documentation platforms.
• The lessons learned—both successes and mistakes—when scaling to many companies.

This talk is not about presenting a perfect formula. It’s about showing a real-world case of how we tried to make InnerSource work in a complex environment, and what we learned along the way. My hope is that others can take these ideas, adapt them, and avoid some of the bumps we faced.

What is the most effective way to drive new process and technology adoption, the carrot or the stick? It depends who you ask. Stakeholders at different levels of an organization approach InnerSource adoption differently.

We will look at the different types of incentives that can be used to drive effective and sustained InnerSource adoption at different levels of an organization. I will share what I have learned while building incentive programs at different organizations. Not all incentives are created equal and monetary incentives are often not the most effective drivers of change! Every person is motivated by something different.

As developers increasingly use AI coding assistants as part of their workflow, will the value of InnerSource contributions from humans diminish? How can AI be integrated into various aspects of the InnerSource ecosystem? From a marketplace of InnerSourced AI agents, to chatbots and MCP servers for discovering and leveraging InnerSourced solutions, learn how Booz Allen is accelerating outcomes through the intersection of community-driven development and AI.

InnerSource is an incredible paradigm to follow for any organization, allowing even Fortune 500 Companies feel like a startup. For the IBM Z platform with over 60 years of custom tooling and a legendary reputation for quality to adopt a culture of InnerSource is not a simple switch. How do you encourage developers that side project culture could be valuable to the business? How do you implore your organizations leaders by taking a project from an idea to their next business decision? Join us as we discuss how we showed InnerSource’s potential value to help bolster IBM’s business.

Open collaboration within enterprise walls occupies a unique security position that falls between traditional open source and proprietary development models. Because the OpenSSF’s mission focuses on securing genuinely open source software, InnerSource projects can’t directly leverage these resources as intended. Yet they face distinctive security challenges that existing enterprise tools often fail to address.

This session explores how OpenSSF tools and frameworks, designed for public open source projects, can be thoughtfully adapted for InnerSource environments. We’ll examine why standard OpenSSF approaches don’t translate directly—lacking external community scrutiny while operating under corporate constraints—and demonstrate practical adaptations that preserve the security benefits.

We begin with threat modeling specific to InnerSource: insider threats from broad internal access, transitive trust risks through internal dependencies, and tooling gaps between open source transparency and enterprise security requirements. Through concrete examples, we’ll show how tools like Security Scorecards, SLSA attestations, and Best Practices Badge criteria can be modified for internal repositories while maintaining their security value.

Attendees will gain a systematic framework for evaluating which OpenSSF resources apply to their InnerSource projects, how to adapt community-focused tools for enterprise constraints, and practical implementation strategies that bridge the gap between open source security practices and corporate development needs.

Who Should Attend: • InnerSource program managers seeking to mature security practices • Security TPMs evaluating open source-inspired tools for enterprise use • DevSecOps engineers integrating security into collaborative internal codebases • Engineering leaders balancing open source practices with corporate security requirements

In June of 2025 The Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded space research and development center, hosted an internal Contribfest with the aim to familiarize developers with and encourage the adoption of InnerSource practices throughout the company. As a non-profit, Aerospace faces unique challenges in supporting & adopting InnerSource practices. InnerSource has been a bottoms-up approach, and the Contribfest is a part of the strategy development leads took in response.

This session will cover the process of planning, prepping, and running the Contribfest, as well as discuss the impact, both culturally and in metrics, the company has seen in the weeks and months following. This session will also cover the pitfalls and lessons-learned of the session and offer advice and tools to help other companies host a similar event.

Ten years ago, the InnerSource Commons Foundation began a bold experiment: could Open Source principles of transparency, collaboration, and shared ownership thrive within individual companies or firms? The short answer is yes. From enabling cross-team reuse to fostering global communities of practice, InnerSource has helped organizations reimagine how they build software and scale knowledge. But the road hasn’t always been smooth.

This session marks a decade of progress, celebrates the breakthroughs and the hard-won lessons, while reflecting on the cultural shifts that have occurred. We’ll explore how servant leadership and contribution-based models have helped teams navigate resistance, build trust, and unlock new ideas and ways of working. We’ll dive-in and examine the balancing of tensions between autonomy and alignment, speed and sustainability, accelerated innovation and inclusion.

In today’s rapidly evolving landscape where AI, hybrid work, systemic friction and uncertainty are reshaping the world of work, InnerSource offers a blueprint for navigating tomorrow’s challenges. It offers more than a tools and processes, it defines a new a mindset that centers on people and culture. Because behind every pull request is a human being with needs, wants, constraints, creativity and more, and when we design systems that honor human beings and their lived experiences, we create space for anyone to make meaningful contributions that make our world better.

We cannot pretend that the road ahead and problems we face tomorrow, climate change, pollution, ethical AI, digital equity, etc. aren’t daunting or terrifying. Solving these enormous problems demands more than technological advancement it requires active participation, diverse perspectives and ideas and the ability to collaborate across visible and invisible boundaries.

InnerSource, at its best, can be a catalyst for traversing choppy waters towards the kind of innovation that elevates voices across geographies, disciplines, and backgrounds by surfacing ideas that no single team or person could generate alone.

This session invites us to look back with joy, wonder and a sense of accomplishment and forward with intention and hope for building a better future together. We need to celebrate what we’ve built, challenge our current assumptions, and co-create our tomorrow. Because the future of work isn’t about technology, it’s deeply human and what we cultivate today will tell us what we value and shape who we will be tomorrow.

As our 24-hour, multi-location celebration draws to a close, we come together to reflect on an extraordinary milestone—the 10th anniversary of InnerSource Commons. From Yokohama to Berlin to New York, and through contributions from speakers around the world, we’ve shared ideas, stories, and successes that showcase the power of open collaboration within organizations.

This closing session will celebrate the collective achievements of our community, highlight key takeaways from across all regions, and look ahead to the next decade of InnerSource innovation. Together, we’ll reaffirm our shared mission: to foster transparency, trust, and collaboration in every corner of the enterprise.

Join us as we close the Summit with gratitude, inspiration, and a renewed commitment to the future of InnerSource.