Collaboration Summit 2015

You have convinced a small group of leaders in your company that we need to embrace open source and you have been told to go make it successful. What do you do next? You still need to get work done with the rest of the company and make open source a key part of the thinking and planning. This talk will address how to create awareness, internal communities support and enthusiasm for open source work and change the perception from fringe to mainstream inside an enterprise. We will also discuss the role of OS office in enabling ecosystem development, engineering collaboration and business success. 

Open Source is a phenomenon made possible by the will of the customer and end user, leading to a world where end users collaborate directly with developers. This was not by accident: end users were able to collaborate in this way because of the establishment of the four freedoms and the resulting managed ecosystem of open source platforms. The resulting changes in development process led to open source becoming the dominant way to innovate in software. Ultimately, open source is a victory of process, governance and agility, which are at least as important as the code. But what lessons can we take away from open source domination, especially as we advance forward with new technologies? If the four freedoms drove open source development, will they play the same role in the advancement of cloud computing? 

In this talk, we will look at examples from the cloud computing world and other areas of science. Is the secret to innovation the creation of sound processes and good governance?

The business playing field is being leveled around the world while global complexity is increasing, and the people and companies that are successful are the ones who can collaborate. Innovation is often deeply collaborative and networked, and collaborative development, particularly in open source, is disrupting how software is being built. Companies must understand that accumulating knowledge becomes less valuable than leveraging the flow of knowledge to generate new knowledge – an area central to communities.

This presentation will discuss key points about the world being increasingly “flat”, how that relates to communities and networks, and how collaborative companies actively manage both their internal and external R&D successfully. 

OpenStack is a project that in a fairly short amount of time has attracted in its ecosystem most of IT giants, becoming one of the largest collaborative software development efforts ever seen. From inside, it is quite visible that few companies are organized to allow collaboration across corporate borders. More often instead, companies have policies that actively prevent collaboration to happen. Despite the fact that free software has become ubiquitous, organizations have learned how to deal with licensing issues and distributed software engineering to some extent, but the day-to-day collaborative development is still troublesome. In this talk we'll explore how collaboration works in OpenStack and how companies contribute to the project, what drives their motivations. There will also be time to see examples of how development teams are setup and general tips for corporations.

More and more companies are starting their own open source projects, and many (like Samsung, Intel, HP, etc.) have dedicated teams working on open source as 'external R&D.' It's important to understand what makes an open source project successful - whether you're starting your own project, or evaluating why and how to participate in an existing one. It takes more than just great code! In this presentation, Guy Martin will cover the basic anatomy and key features of open source projects that work. Governance, licensing, development methodology, and cultural factors like openness and technical/business transparency are just a few of the topics that will be covered. Guy will also discuss how open infrastructure components like mailings lists, IRC, git, etc. help make an open source project successful.