InnerSource Portal
Title
InnerSource Portal
Patlet
Potential contributors cannot easily discover InnerSource projects that they are interested in. By creating an intranet website that indexes all available InnerSource project information you enable contributors to learn about projects that might interest them and InnerSource project owners to attract an outside audience.
Problem
InnerSource project teams are finding it difficult to attract outside contributions.
InnerSource projects at your organization are increasing but potential contributors have no easy way of discovering them.
Story
You are attempting to establish an InnerSource practice within your organization. You are aware of some projects being run using an InnerSource model but their existence is only being communicated via word of mouth, email or sidebar conversations with other employees. As a result InnerSource project owners are finding it difficult to attract contributors.
There is no single, shared resource for employees across the organization to access which will allow them to easily discover all ongoing InnerSource projects. This is severely limiting the growth potential of every InnerSource project.
What can be done to help all InnerSource projects raise their visibility to as large an audience as possible and attract contributors organization-wide?
Context
Your organization is interested in adopting an InnerSource work style.
InnerSource project owners are seeking a way to attract audiences to their projects. However, they are limited by the communication channels available to them through which they could advertise to potential contributors.
InnerSource projects at your organization are increasing.
Compounding this problem is the fact that the shared source control management application in use has such limited search capabilities that even developers in search of InnerSource projects find it frustrating to locate them.
Prerequisites
Managers have given tacit acceptance that their employees should take part in InnerSource projects
A shared source control management system is in use which provides programmatic access to the contents of the repositories it hosts
There is a department within your organization with the responsibility of promoting InnerSource collaboration
Forces
The full potential for separate engineering teams to partner on shared challenges is not being realized
It is difficult for individuals to discover what InnerSource projects exist
It is difficult for InnerSource project owners to attract an audience of external contributors
Solutions
Create an InnerSource Portal intranet website where InnerSource project owners can easily advertise the availability of their projects.
Key properties of the portal are:
Visitors to the InnerSource Portal should be able to see all available projects as well as search for specific projects based on various criteria such as project name, technologies in use, contributor names, sponsoring business unit etc.
The information displayed via the InnerSource Portal should be under the full control of the InnerSource project owners at all times. Preferably, by sourcing this information directly from a specific data file or meta-data stored in the project repository itself.
Project owners should include all relevant information concerning their projects within those data files including the project name, trusted contributors' names, a brief description and links to the code repository or any supporting documentation.
(optional) While most organizations will choose to make their portal only available on their intranet, some organizations have opted to make their portal available on the public internet. The latter can be interesting for organizations that want to show additional information about their InnerSource approach in their portal e.g. for branding and recruitment purposes.
When launching the portal, a communications campaign promoting the addition of InnerSource data files or meta-data to code repositories should be considered, to bolster the number of projects displayed within the portal.
Implementations
SAP Project Portal
A reference implementation of an InnerSource portal is available on GitHub and open for contributions. It lists all InnerSource projects of an organization in an interactive and easy to use way. Projects can self-register using a dedicated GitHub topic and provide additional metadata.
Wiki
As a simple way to start, you can set aside a page on an internal wiki for listing out available projects. An easy way to display this information is in a table with columns giving just a little bit of extra information about the projects. Try to have just enough columns so that viewers can determine if they want to learn more about the project, but no more. Too much information will make the page overwhelming and difficult to use. Individuals and teams can self-add their projects to the page.
Here is a sample set of columns:
Name. Name of the project (optionally linked to its homepage).
Brief Description. Explaining the purpose of the project (which problem does it solve?)
Technology Pre-requisites. You must use these technologies in order to on-board to the project.
Getting Started. Link to instructions on how to start using the project.
Chat. Link to a chat channel to ask questions about the project.
Host Team. Seeing if a team is behind the project can help others to have the confidence to use it.
Production Since. How long as the project been used in a production environment? Seeing this information is a rough proxy for its maturity.
Contribution. Link to instructions on how to contribute to the project.
This solution doesn't allow for a fancy display - it is just a wiki table. If it's important for you to have a snazzy-looking UI, then this idea won't work for you. Additionally, if you end up with a lot of projects (e.g. nearing 100), this solution won't scale to allow the search and filtering or auto-updating of project entries that you'll probably need. It is a good solution for a portal with a few dozen projects, though.
Resulting Context
The InnerSource Portal has enabled InnerSource project owners to advertise their projects to an organization-wide audience. Due to this increased visibility they are attracting much larger communities of contributors than ever before.
For those looking to get involved in InnerSource projects, the InnerSource Portal has allowed them to discover exactly the kind of opportunities they are interested in by searching across all available InnerSource projects simultaneously based on their specific criteria.
Satisfying the needs of both of these audiences has helped establish InnerSource as a viable and attractive option for all areas of the organization to leverage to accomplish things together they could not have separately.
Known Instances
A large financial services organization has used the creation of an InnerSource Portal to provide a mechanism of advertising and discovering InnerSource projects in existence across different business units
SAP promotes InnerSource projects in the InnerSource Portal - projects can self-register using GitHub topics. The Repository Activity Score defines the default order of the InnerSource projects in the portal. Also see Michael Graf & Harish B (SAP) at ISC.S11 - The Unexpected Path of Applying InnerSource Patterns. Its codebase is published as a reference implementation and open for contributions.
Elbit Systems has used this pattern and added gamification on top.
Gamification As Means of Cultural Change and InnerSource Engagement Booster | Shelly Nizri | OSCON 2018 - Portland, Oregon
The code realizing this platform has been open sourced.
American Airlines promotes InnerSource projects via an internal InnerSource Marketplace. Similarly to SAP, projects self-register by adding
innersourceas a GitHub topic. Projects are searchable and filterable by language, topics, number of open issues, etc.Banco Santander has created a public portal called "Santander ONE Europe InnerSource Community" to support and increase InnerSource adoption. In addition to the catalog of projects the portal includes relevant content such as documentation, way of working, news, and events.
Airbus used the SAP Portal as a Proof of Concept. It is now using the Bazaar plugin of Backstage as the latter became the official developer experience tool internally. It provides a convenient self-registering capability for all the divisions.
Mercado Libre use an instance of the SAP portal to discover existing InnerSource projects within the organization.
Mercedes-Benz is using the SAP reference implementation mentioned above for their InnerSource Portal.
WellSky has a simple Confluence Wiki page were InnerSource and reusable projects are listed.
References
The InnerSource Portal pattern has been proven to work extremely well with the associated InnerSource Gig Marketplace pattern in this context
Status
Structured
Author(s)
Stephen McCall
Acknowledgments
Shelly Nizri
Melinda Malmgren
Michael Graf
Jesús Alonso Gutierrez
Last updated
