Shane is founder of Punderthings℠ LLC consultancy, helping organizations find better ways to engage with the critical open source projects that power modern technology and business. He blogs and tweets about open source governance and trademark issues, and has spoken at major technology conferences like ApacheCon, OSCON, All Things Open, Community Leadership Summit, and Ignite.
Shane Curcuru serves as VP Brand Management for the ASF, wrote the trademark and branding policies that cover all 200+ Apache® projects, and assists projects with defining and policing their trademarks, as well as negotiating agreements with various software vendors using Apache software brands. Shane is serving a seventh term as an elected Director of the ASF, providing governance oversight, community mentoring, and fiscal review for all Apache projects.
Otherwise, Shane is: a father and husband, a BMW driver and punny guy. Oh, and we have cats! Follow @ShaneCurcuru and read about open source communities and see my FOSS Foundation directory.
Authored Comments
Great article and important lessons for corporate leaders everywhere. But there's one important step also needed: have a corporate policy for FOSS contributions. Ensure that your legal and leadership teams agree on an overall policy up front. Don't make each separate development team have to jump through the same hoops just to make obvious contributions.
Corporate contribution policies was covered on opensource.com a while back, but there are plenty of other places including the InnerSource movement to learn more:
https://opensource.com/business/14/1/open-source-policy-works-practice
Expectations are just the flip side of doing research in a new community. Hopefully your communities publish their expectations of behavior, technical work expected/accepted, and how to gain more access or merit within the community.
This is an area historically hard to get right in open source communities built by technical experts - who already know how their stuff works. The point is your community welcome message needs to appeal to newcomers.
The lifeblood of any FOSS community is new contributors. Making it easy for newcomers to start contributing is the most important thing we can do for our projects.