Kartik Subbarao

One of the most enriching experiences of my career at Hewlett-Packard was serving as Global Lead for HP’s Open Source and Linux Profession (OSLP). The OSLP is HP’s company-wide community of practice for open source technologists, with thousands of members worldwide. Working to build the OSLP gave me insights into the value that an internal community can provide to its organization, to its members, and to external communities.

An internal community, even if it is an all-volunteer effort like the OSLP that relies on management-supported discretionary time, can provide the kind of context for open source activities in an organization that can’t be found anywhere else. Open Source projects on the Internet are typically focused on a specific technology area, and cater to a potentially large, diverse group of end users. The challenge for internal deployments is often the inverse — to get a variety of open source technologies working together to address the unique needs of a single organization.

This inverse relationship can be highly complementary. The internal community can provide external communities with the kind of validation that they prize highly — that their work is solving real-world problems. And external communities can inspire corporate employees to envision how their work fits into a greater landscape. Over time, members of one community may join the other, as employees contribute to open source projects and open source contributors are hired by companies.

An internal open source community can gather intelligence on new and promising open source projects. If members are excited and energized about a new project, they’re often willing to spend lots of time (including personal time) investigating it further. As they interact with the external community developing that project, they get a sense for how compatible that community’s goals and interests are with their own. They can assess the potential for successful deployment in their organization, and for ongoing collaboration. The internal community effectively vets the external community. This holistic evaluation, when done by an expert internal community, is far more comprehensive than the kind of requirements analysis done in a traditional IT customer/vendor relationship where the roles of “consumer” and “producer” are rigidly defined.

An internal open source community is an excellent place to develop leaders in an organization. Many important leadership skills can be honed while collaborating on open source initiatives, such as articulating a compelling vision, motivating people to take action, sharing knowledge, and making principle-centered decisions. These opportunities are available to anyone in the community at any time, just by stepping up and volunteering to lead an activity of common interest. The community can provide attuned coaching and mentoring for its members, which increases the capability of the community as a whole.

By demonstrating and evangelizing about the benefits of open source, the community can have a far-reaching impact on an organization. Over time, the community can guide the organization to higher levels of effectiveness with open philosophies across the spectrum of people, process, technology and business.