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Understanding the InnerSource Checklist

Author: Silona Bonewald

Publication Date: May 2017

Publisher: O’Reilly Media

Read the book

Do you want your day job to be more like your work on a favorite Open Source Project? Do your teams need to reduce technical debt? Do you want to break down the silos between your people and allow more collaboration and reuse?

Come learn more about an InnerSource checklist developed at PayPal. Hear more about our success stories with InnerSource and how we are codifying our practices to help more teams at PayPal and beyond.

Author Silona Bonewald explains how the InnerSource initiative can help your company develop software internally by applying lessons from the open source movement. A checklist guides you through various steps needed to produce software using the InnerSource approach, whether it’s company wide or just for one team.

Alongside the how, Bonewald — Director of InnerSource at PayPal — also explains the why behind InnerSource. You’ll learn ways to improve collaboration, create cleaner code, reduce bottlenecks, and facilitate integrations among teams.

This report examines:

  • Ways to adapt InnerSource to your business environment without diluting open source fundamentals
  • The crucial role of the Trusted Committer in the InnerSource process
  • How to extract tribal knowledge from silos through passive documentation
  • Why contributing agreements formalize the responsibilities of developers who originate code
  • How to move from internal silos to internal transparency
  • Adapting Open Source collaboration to Planning and Management

About the Author

Silona Bonewald has been a member of the open source community since the late ’90s, and is currently director of InnerSource at Paypal.