Contributing to Open Source

Organisational change can be very hard to achieve since organisations are naturally protective of themselves and the status quo. Setting up an OSPO and beginning an open source journey will seem like a risky and dangerous proposition for many parts of an organisation.

📄️ Compliance

Contributing to an open source project from within a regulated firm is likely to contravene one or more policies. Staff who contribute to open source as part of their jobs are likely to be in breach of their terms of employment or likely to get disciplined. For this reason, in order to enable open source contribution, new policy needs to be written which creates space within the compliance landscape.

📄️ Training

It is generally preferable if an Open Source Contribution Policy can be enforced via tooling (so called policy as code). However, often policy will refer to behaviours and expectations of staff which cannot be controlled through systems. In these cases, training courses will be needed to help promote desired behaviours.

📄️ Surveillance

This article looks at the best practices around surveillance (of communications) to enable open source contribution.

📄️ Publication

This article looks at the best practices around publication (of code) to enable open source contribution.

📄️ Engagement

Within the Open Source Ecosystem, millions of projects exist and some of the projects are duplicate efforts. The open source community is vast and sometimes very hard to reach.

📄️ Culture

When people think about open source, most often they think about the engineering aspects: contributing or consuming code. But community and culture are a central part of the open source world and should not be overlooked.

📄️ Talent

Managing talent in financial institutions is crucial because the quality, motivation, and expertise of their workforce directly influence the institutions' ability to innovate, maintain a competitive edge, comply with regulatory requirements, and ultimately drive financial performance and growth.