Remote Work And How We Can Learn From The Open Source Communities

About

Today I talked with Johannes Tigges, the Assistant Secretary at InnerSource Commons Foundation.

Johannes provided a lot of insight into what innersource is and how it can benefit organizations. We dived even deeper into something he is an expert in – remote work and how we can learn a lot from open source software communities.

Transcript

hey everybody welcome back to the 25th episode of open source for business brought to you by open teams my name is
henry badri and today i talked with johannes tiggers the assistant secretary at the inner source commons foundation
johannes provided a lot of insight into what inner source is and how it can benefit organizations and we dived even
deeper into something he is definitely an expert in and that is remote work and how we can learn a lot from open source
communities now whether you are a user developer manager or you’re just curious about the
industry then open teams is the place to find the information news training and support that you need to thrive with
open source software now that the introductions are out of the way let’s dive into this episode
all right johannes thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today my pleasure henry i’ve been very excited
to chat with you and i know you’ve been working at the inner source commons foundation you’re currently the
assistant secretary so can we talk a bit about how you actually got into that position how you got into open source
and get a bit of an idea of your story up until today oh yeah sure so um that all happened
more or less well by by semi accident if you will um
so back back a long long time uh one one um [Music]
assistant lecturer told us about open source and what it can be and i have actually
at that point never heard of it because i grew up when there was still like the windows is of this world
and linux was yeah technically it was this thing but it was not install a ubuntu or
red hat or what have you on your system and so windows was fine but what he told me
actually sounds fine like you can work together with other people and you don’t need to do everything twice and all
these things and there are licenses that can sort of protect it and you’ll come
out with common goods and all that and that was really interesting to me and then
i ended up going through research uh organizations that like
software research and all that where you basically can do parts of that and there’s sorts of collaboration that was
nice at that point and then fast forward some 10 years so whatever
that might have been i ended up at a company named here technologies which does make maps for
example like the digital maps one of the 405 map makers of this world and um
they’re within something called an open source programs office which the listeners to this podcast very likely
know by now and we figured like is it possible to apply
open source methods within the company like if you’re a really large company and
you might actually end up having something that looks akin to a bit of a silo or you may
not but it have it isn’t unheard of let me put it like that and open source methods like
strengthening collaboration and all that might help there and so um
i feel like okay google to run a bit mind there must have been people who did open source inside
of companies i’m not the first one here and as it is most of the times the case
with open source yes they are and in that case it was called inner source it turns out that it is also a thing with
the earliest research papers going from i guess 2005 and don’t ask me who
started it i mean the term was coined by tim o’reilly if i remember correctly
um but there were like phillips things going on and bosch for example with their so-called
bios program bosch internal open source and um [Music]
then figured yeah oh right there is there is actually quite the research body and there’s this nice uh community
called dinosaurs commons and um by that time i mean if you have a
company that is really big like thousands of people’s big and you want to try to change a company and bring
bring something there you you can’t just separate like divide yourself into multiple pieces or just multiplayer that
is not how it works but what you can do is create teaching material and that is almost as good as
multiplying yourself as you at least get some multiplication effects and multiplicator effects
and knowing that creation of teaching material like those online courses is actually quite the
effort like quite the effort more than if you would do it on in presence where you can
correct everything um and this is not the effort i can do as a
yeah one-man show with a bit of support here so i thought well is there maybe something
and turned out yes there is something there is something called the inner source commons learning path because this problem is actually a
problem that a lot of other people had for example at nike with russ ratler rutledge and within
bios with geocutter denise cooper had it at that time
with paypal and it turns out that also isabelle draws from who is at oil pace
they all had similar problems and it and then the nice part is that i happen to to know isabel and aeropace is also in
berlin where i’m located so i try to contribute it a bit to to learning paths
and saying all right there is there is already great material like i can totally use that already and because inner source basically is
if you will it reproduces parts of how the apache model looks like and
basically makes a bit of an easier approach to common open source terms such as the
maintainer role which inner source calls the trusted committer but more or less that’s the maintainer and
the diffusion of like the managing and product owning role if you will um plus
the technical role which is your average open source maintainer and then you have
a bit of how do what do i do as a contributor and what why would i actually want to do this or something
you can show someone who want to you want to possibly motivate to actually let you do that and there are a few funny side effects
if you do it in a company because then you are in a hierarchical structure and so and people who can tell you what to
do which is less so the case in open source or in the case of corporate open source and
inner company collaboration it is still individual actors not centrally controlled actors or minor differences
but in the end that is open source and i always say inner source is the bridge towards open source as in you learn the
skills there then you know how to swim in a nice pool and then you can go out to the pool that has sharks and um
those those uh special australian jellyfish hopefully not um
and i heard like uh they would they are like the box oh yeah yeah the box yeah perfect those
i heard they are really really like dangerous very dangerous lethal
so you don’t want them there or if you want like you know how to deal with them so those are not in the inner source
pool but like the box jellyfish of open sources all the licenses and
having to work completely in the open that is something that many people don’t um like from the get-go if they haven’t
been in in contact with open source in the first place that that’s actually nice um but you should absolutely not stop at
inner service like just within the company i mean some things are not really meant to be open source
because they are for example a business differentiator you don’t want to publish them
but um don’t like that is something i heard like people yeah we know we’re doing
inner source well that is all you have to do for open source uh please pre-stride it as an opportunity
like to level up your people and scale them up and if you have something where you have a good business case to actually publish
um then please do because open source still has all the advantages and is the real thing if you will and you can
reduce your silo effects so there is only only opportunities to win in there but
there’s also more opportunities to so to win in an open source so
don’t let just uh just let them go um so advertisement section end
um but that is that and um because i heard cases where people stopped
inside although they would have had a motivation to go open so yeah that’s that’s why i imagine it
and um yeah so there was this learning path and that was like really useful and
then we figured that we need a um need the contributor section so the role
that actually adds to project and here we had basically oh and we have no one to do that and it was like
writing all the articles the running path is videos plus articles and it was like writing articles and all right who
do we who do we have you could do the next section and by that point i was getting close to the maintainer trusted
committer role as in being really active in the project and working with russ and all and the rest i was like
why don’t you like would you be interested in doing a video and then have annoying isabel and why
don’t we bring isabelle on board and so that happened that i basically made and made that um
made the video with her and wrote the attics and all that and we actually had also had a nice studio um
that we filmed that in with a very nice support by o’reilly where you can also have the
learning part on their platform um and doing all that it basically ends that i ended up also basically
participating in their governance system and um as you like a company if it grows
large enough it will have some sort of governance whatever it might look like just a bunch of people meeting every now
and then and say like what do we do or in a smaller open source project the person like what do i do do i want to
take that on governance and um at some point
we decided to turn uh inner source comments like a group of people just
into one of these us 501 c 3 like non-profit
entities so we can have the usual benefits of that and like and um
since i was already quite active in that position i like worked with getting that getting that going getting it running i
ended up in i guess a star of last year not only as the the
one of the first um members as in five of three one two three gets you a member
status i’d like a corner you could it’s not a union not a union as in credit union but it’s
sort of ghost there i mean those who might be familiar with the irs code more than me since i’m not american
probably know what that is but it’s it’s basically a member-owned um entity uh yeah
non-profit so that that’s what it is and since uh we do rotate directors that was
like someone wanted to rotate out of being director and it’s like i already did things that looked very
secretary and apparently i look like uh a person that can do that so i got
elected and that’s how i ended up there and um yeah so that that’s that and
we try to do as much as we can in a remote basis and on a written basis
there is a slack according to it or next to it we got use some email and something that has
worked for us if we do a synchronous working meeting um then we actually take minutes or like we call them notes but
they’re sort of minutes like extended especially structured minutes um nothing fancy actually but it does
work so everyone who hasn’t been there can just read them and they do
because now that uh the comments has have actually grown significantly i don’t have the current numbers in mind
but they’re a good four-digit number and um
we have people from regularly active people actually from japan for example from china
i think there are quite a few people from india right now obviously lots of
european people from for example france spain germany ireland uk
russia and so that that’s just the top of her mind and then there are obviously lots
of of people from the us and um so more or less across all time zones so we
have to have to sort of work with that and um yeah open source is basically
being same as in contributors from everywhere has to deal with that too so
that is sort of more or less native to me right you’ve taken a lot of the principles and techniques that our open
source communities adopt and use through open collaboration working in different time zones and that kind of
thing and you’ve applied it within your business and it’s worked you mentioned something along the lines of a written
it it’s very important to write everything down because that’s how the open source communities work so could you dive a little bit into that like why
is it so important to have everything written down and what does that look like for a company yes of course i can do that um
so we all know documentation and we know documentation is outdated the moment we have written it um that’s why nobody
likes to write documentation and um then i’m like well what should i write
in it and no no i mean we all some people like documenting like like writing the proper documentation i mean
it has been heard of i see some i.t security people like to write big swathes of paper and some say oh we
need action not paper like i’m not getting into that that uh discussion which one is better but those two exist
in any case um but what you can do is and and that is actually what we’re doing each and every
day now now no more than ever with all those those uh text messengers for example
like slack or what do we have whatsapp or signal or what they are called like in
the earlier days we had the texts uh limited size text and there is the twitter obviously
um and then we have issues for example we have all the emails we write and um then
there are the one one of the backbones of open source um mailing lists like oh i all know mailing
lists but so um open source being tech and tech being special that basically means people put a specific bit of
software below it such that you don’t just uh cram 50 000 addresses in your uh
recipient bar but you actually cram one address in there and then it just hop and spoke distributes it to or whomever
is subscribed there which basically makes it easier for people to add and remove them and if you do that you can
actually have proper threading and you can have a proper archive and like all these sorts of things and
the the software from the 90s i guess yeah mailman is probably from the 90s it
looks like that but it still works um can also get you a digest like what
happened this day and if you for example have the linux kernel mailing list which is famous for
um linus’s um outbursts at uh topics that really
he does not like and at times he is completely on point there with because
some things are like not really what should happen um but like that happens but there’s
also lots of civilized discourse and there is and you cannot like there are i would guess a hundred or maybe a
thousand messages per day you do not want to read them individually when you want to access
them individually maybe some of them and then you get basically get a threaded structure and you can follow it in the
archive that is what such documentation may look like if you have an issue there are
your average corporate issues i will call them now which is basically a header line and it’s on the board and
that is about it and if you know want to know what what the hell was actually supposed to be going on there you’re supposed to ask the person
um who may or may not remember what this was supposed to be
and then there are issues that are a bit more complete we can like
read it or have this since they have this lovely comment function read what has evolved and what might need be do
and need to be done like if you have a definition of done if that happens to be active in your company like can check
things off so that is what such documentation may look like and if you then remember that you can basically for
example in the case of chats group chats for example your average slack channel
or yet another visitor out of the olden days irc
which is slack just public standardized and less colorful
you can archive that and [Music] make it indexable like put links on it
everything you can do with slack as well and this is basically something that i’ll take the the term from isabelle but
it’s more or less of a standing term per passive documentation because you don’t actually
actively write it but it just is there at the moment you can
link to it you can search it and it is permanent you can actually use it for referencement
purposes and if the cases are but isn’t that a huge chaos and like well you need to properly write this down in a formal
way and all that yes you do some things you should actually write up in a structured formal way that is entirely
correct but not everything and we all know these decisions that happen basically in the
next to the water water station or over a coffee and all that
or basically just in the aftermath of a meeting like the meeting after meeting god do i hate those um
and especially if you do them in an open plan office next to someone who tries to work
my pet peeve sorry um and um like the ones i don’t really like
please don’t do that um then there are decisions that are just coming up like
ad hoc somewhere and you do they they are still in effect and at least in my observation prototypes
are the most resilient things this planet has um and so you guys
those things basically end up in these messages end up in these emails end up in these whatever so if you don’t have a
chance to actually say well it is like it is life’s accepted let’s conserve them and link to them
um yeah and that is basically what goes in there on there and yes you can totally link to an email
um that has this singular decision going on in one of your more formal documentation
parts that works and if you then happens to happen to amass like 50 000 of them
fine like put condense them onto a web page in a good way hopefully
and you have more formal documentation but that basically takes a lot away a lot of these ah we need to write it up
what should we write in there what did we talk about like all these sorts of problems like here you go just i’ll link
you there just as you would forward whatever sort of email you might have had this is actually not bad i mean you can
as long as you make all of this as explicit as possible here’s how we’re going to do this yes
this is okay we’ll make these indexable and accessible for everyone and all that
then you actually don’t exclude people so everyone can see that that happened
um we are agreeing on that once this and that and this happens in issues
this happens in yeah well code is something different but sort of comparable because it has the
same features and versions it happens occurs chat conversations and
yes there are bikies which are the formal documentation of this and
for example the apache software foundation who has brought you some fun things such as the apache http httpd the
web server um which power still powers lots and lots of um the web in the internet’s websites or
hadoop one of those big data software pieces like lots of them tomcat probably still used
all apache software and they are actually using that approach and it has worked only mailing lists
plus now they have a slack actually um and it works for them since 20 years and
the software wouldn’t be there if that would completely not work and what this gets you actually
is um the case of you’re being resilient against time zones
and you’re being resilient against people leaving which they will at some point in a corporate environment just as
well as in a in an open source environment and they can like oh what was there and like in other cases oh yeah we might
want to ask it if they can restore the mail uh inbox and like uh did we already
discard them or in germany would the workers council say you may not for good
reasons or less good reasons and if you have them public in the first place and this was a public discussion then you’ll
have them and it will work and this is the same case for actually writing good issues
that actually where you try to achieve the goal of having the issue tell you everything you
need to know about the problem at hand basically it’s just like you get a file and in the file there’s everything you
need to know if you manage that that’s fine because then
after some reading up i’m not saying it works instantly but once a person has read up they can actually actually have
an idea of what’s happened what has happened there why it has happened there because often
you have these these constructions where you think like why the hell is this like it is shouldn’t be different this totally does
not make any sense in case of for example crazy optimizations um and then yeah let’s do it differently
and then some some days later load happens and people find out a second time where the
crate why the crazy optimization was done because that was the only way to bear that load
um and if you have these archives you can actually like okay they had the same
pain as we did they found out the same problem they don’t like the optimization but they didn’t have anything else so
unless we solve the problem that we just see here or have seen here um
we’ll probably better keep it so that’s that is something you also gain you lose less knowledge yes you have to read it
yes it is time investment i’m not concealing that but it does work
um and it’s there in the first place and you don’t have to find it out the hard way the second time so that it does that
um so resilience against time resilience against people leaving or coming you can
onboard people faster for example you have have these issues have this thread read it i and then we have this wiki 2
which has a bit of information but probably is outdated you might want to update this whatever you have read in
the issues and if then there is something please ask these that and these people because they’re all names
on them this usually gets you gets people on board a lot faster
which you have to do because all often open source projects do not have full-time engineers or on them or
full-time managers that could handle such things but in the first waves as you had with mackie um
there are with these ways where it was just hobbyists and yes they don’t they will they have time for their herbie and
that is about it so they need to get people on board without the full effort and the same advantages you can now just
use in a more corporate environment or yeah so that that is what has happened there and it basically is all along the
same lines there are a few specifics if you want to have the full
full steam going on in a full-time employee environment that has differences and if you expect
the reaction times of full-time in full-time environments that is also different but there are approaches to it
um what else yeah so that’s that is about the
gist of many of those things yeah thank you so much that was extremely extensive and i thought there
were some really great best practices for people to be able to actually implement within their company to make
sure remote work works for them and i know there’s the advantages of asynchronous asynchronous communications
some sensors but when i gave a few of the examples i thought they were great best practices but on the other hand i
know you’ve probably had a lot of experience seeing things that don’t work and that cause remote work to fail for a
lot of companies so what are some of those things that companies should be aware of when actually trying to implement remote
work in the right way what do they need to be concerned about when when starting that or when trying to improve that
process oh yeah yeah very very good point here obviously not everything is basically
your average silver bullet because don’t they they those don’t exist so starting off like we had slack
and um yeah i’ll like make things uh less less verbose maybe we had slack slack has this uh
commercially very nicely motivated but very um effective 10 000 message border
and you think ah let’s let’s do let’s do a slack then yes please take that into account
if you want to if you have your slack as your prior as your primary channel
and you try to use passive documentation on that one consider that you might need to actually
pay a license for them or use a different structure i mean there is for example matamos a full remote company
actually um that offers such a system that also costs money you can’t have the
free version not going into that part but at least it doesn’t have a ten thousand message border um
so that for example i think yeah like things going away [Music]
that is one thing then for example um asynchronous communication and
synchronized communication you need you need to balance them that is there is actually i’m not saying asynchronous is everything because it isn’t there are
some things that should really be synchronous you need to have or should be synchronous every now
and then you should you need to also since once you go remote you need to replicate the
water cooler effect the water cooler effect and the magic of beer and coffee or whatever your favorite beverage is um
i happen to be german so i need to like beer actually without the alcohol
but it’s still lovely beer and that is something you need to replicate which
you can try by means of for example meeting every now and then
for exit companies i know that do a yearly retreat or a like half a year a retreat and but they basically all
convene on an island in the case of metro most as i heard or yeah another
german company uh commute actually does the island case as well and that actually works for pretty large
companies still and the point is you basically get to see each other and you get to get to
have a feel of what the other person is like because if you even if you do textual written communication
either you are very very very explicit in how you mean things and like
over-communicate effectively such that you replace the the um the facial expressions and all the the
nice undertones of language um be it sarcasm or whatever it might be
um like yeah yeah let’s pray that that one
and um yeah so that is something that you can only interpret once you have seen a person
face to face so you should definitely keep that um
and yeah and another thing is actually if you do hybrid situations for example
like parts of the people are on site uh or in the same floor even that suffices or
like if you have a really long office they are basically on two corners of the same office like five in the meeting
room and five didn’t make it because the coffee was too delicious or there was they were still working and then like five in
zoom pictures for example um you actually need to ensure that
or this is something that will in very little situations work why um because
the audio and the the um facial and visual um fidelity that those people in those
five zoom pictures and those people in the room have are really really different
either even if you have these like poly cone we had polycom cameras back then like we’re like trying to capture the
360 people drop the room fancy fancy hardware but
even those do not fully represent the same case as if you would all be a zoom picture so in these cases
you can just have everyone be a zoom picture even if they are basically
yeah on different corners of the same room but this basically uh equalizes um
and levels the the participation so it might be worse forever voice for everyone but at least it is the same for
everyone and that’s the way nobody feels left out so that’s that part
um and no companies that actually actively do that it might immediately may even
suffice to have different like floors and you get bubbles across these floors because not everyone might visit the
other floor every time so that um also
trying to i mean in in this corona pandemic most of us probably did that like have
an implicit or have an accident like implicit before we did that implicitly while we’re having a coffee
now try to actually explicitly have one of those um
coffee coffee meetings or your your average channel or like where you can just talk
whatever like the random chat slack if you will oh you don’t share me the cooler
yes exactly and like try to do that explicitly you could either have like uh
yeah back then it was team teamspeak or like have a voice call where people just can hop in if they
feel like they want to talk some bull crap um or like want to just have a have a chat and um
yeah let’s let’s have the friday digital beer or something it does not replace meeting fully in person we had that
before but it actually replaces a bit of it and you can in an informal way discuss
things get to know people get to know how they feel what’s going on with them whatever the water cooler did as well
so since it doesn’t have happen implicitly anymore you need to sort of
explicitly replace it but don’t make it mandatory why have you not been at the water cooler this is bad i need you to
come to the water cooler um so a lot of that needs to be um
like not on a mandatory basis but people might should actually want to come there
um so you need to make it an inclusive atmosphere and a nice atmosphere like i need to come there to get all the
important business details this is actually a meeting now it shouldn’t be like that um all right oh there are just just uh just
all the mails and if i don’t uh participate in there is a giant world called hagenwitz like which
would probably be an nsf we joke um an sfw um
which basically excludes people that are not male you can have the female version of the whatever version as well just try
to not do that [Music] be um nice be civil try to include people um
that is that’s the gist so that these are some things that i’ve seen yeah failing awesome i think yeah it
definitely makes sense you got to be more explicit about the way that you talk because like you said you don’t get
sarcasm it’s very difficult to get sarcasm over messages and sometimes it is difficult to really bond
with someone so i think having that in-person event where you actually get to meet the person you get to
figure out who they are what they like beyond really i guess what you can just do back and forward in a chat so i think
they’re really really great things that companies can look out for especially with the pandemic happening and still
probably going to be happening for the foreseeable future and beyond so yeah thank you so much i appreciate that
johannes it’s been great chatting and i’d definitely love to get you on another time in the future
sure sure i’d love to bye [Music]