Adobe I/O Trip Report — Open Source Leadership Summit
The Linux Foundation hosted their annual Open Source Leadership Summit last week in beautiful Lake Tahoe, California. The Open Source Leadership Summit brings together the brightest minds in open source software and collaborative development to share best practices and to create/advance open source infrastructure. This event is “the meeting place for the world’s largest open source projects to come together and explore the latest information on how to start, build or participate in collaborative development”. Uh, yes. Yes to all of that.
I had the opportunity to attend as my first foray into the Open Source Leadership community. What an incredible week with a vibrant community! Huge props to the Linux Foundation event team and gorgeous Tahoe for hosting us. With a ski lift 100 ft. from my hotel room, they succeeded in making me wish I were skiing 100% of the time. Luckily, there were so many amazing people to meet and learn from that I stayed happily occupied.
As we look to build more infrastructure around Open Source @ Adobe, increase the amount of code that is open source, contribute to other projects and engage developers, this was just the place to learn and share our ideas and struggles.
Here are some highlights:
- TODO Group — TODO is an open, collaborative think tank comprised of companies like Facebook, GitHub and Microsoft focused on sharing best practices around running successful open source programs. We’re looking forward to joining this year and helping push this initiative forward. Beyond the TODO Group, everyone at the event truly embraced the culture of open source and were more than willing to share their experiences. There are no trade secrets; everyone wants each other to succeed. One of the key initiatives Adobe is working on is streamlining the Open Source approval process to make it easier for internal employees to open source their projects. We also want to arm internal employees with a toolkit to make sure their project is discoverable and welcoming to contributors once it becomes public.
- Women in Open Source — The Women in Open Source meeting was a huge highlight. The room was packed and standing room only. And when I say standing room, I mean attendees were standing shoulder to shoulder around the room. There were great discussions around enabling more women to speak at industry events and empowering them to share their expertise. The conversation focused on inclusion in Open Source in general for all under-represented groups and it was great to hear everyone’s ideas. From a contribution standpoint, there was a lively discussion about how to be more engaging and welcoming of new committers. Specifically, how to balance handling a large volume of pull requests and contributions that don’t follow the exact guidelines outlined by the community manager, while using each interaction as an opportunity to teach a newcomer. I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes out of this group.
- Presentations — One big theme was “how to run successful Open Source programs at large companies” — JACKPOT! I had the opportunity to learn from leaders at companies like eBay, Capital One and Intel.
Some of the awesome presentations (more have been posted here):
- Dealing with Open Source in a Large Company — Intel
- How Walmart is Building a Successful Open Source Culture — Walmart
- The True Cost of Open Source — eBay
Overall, it was a worthwhile event and the amount of work being done in Open Source, across all industries, is truly humbling and inspiring. But mostly humbling.
It’s exciting to see how Open Source is transforming company cultures. For Adobe, one of our goals is to expand the role that Open Source plays internally and externally. This includes setting up our own Open Source Office this year. We’ll be looking to learn from others with Open Source Office teams. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue this journey to grow Open Source @ Adobe. Learn more here and here.
