I've seen a lot of teams write code internally with the intent of open-sourcing everything once they're done. If you're doing this, you're missing out on a huge opportunity. Just as important as open-sourcing the code, is open-sourcing the collaboration process. Why not make your code 100% open-source from the beginning and let contributors participate in the design process? Let your contributors join in your heated debates & hear the rationale behind your design decisions.
At Origin, 100% of our code is open-source and everything we do is "public by default". We have a culture of radical inclusion and transparency. Everyone is welcome to participate in our open-source engineering process and our product discussions. Our engineers collaborate every day in our Discord (1), we track our progress on a public project board (2), discuss what we're working on each week in a public Google video Hangout (3), and publish our engineering meeting notes for the world to see. (4). As a result, it's really easy for outsiders to get up to speed on what we're building, what our current needs are, and get a feel for our company culture. While our core engineer team is only 9 people, we've had over 60 contributors to our codebase and we have new people showing up every week wanting to get involved. We've also been able to attract and hire amazingly talented people we would never have discovered if we were running a traditional hiring process.
Don't just open-source your code. Open-source your collaboration process too.
At Origin, 100% of our code is open-source and everything we do is "public by default". We have a culture of radical inclusion and transparency. Everyone is welcome to participate in our open-source engineering process and our product discussions. Our engineers collaborate every day in our Discord (1), we track our progress on a public project board (2), discuss what we're working on each week in a public Google video Hangout (3), and publish our engineering meeting notes for the world to see. (4). As a result, it's really easy for outsiders to get up to speed on what we're building, what our current needs are, and get a feel for our company culture. While our core engineer team is only 9 people, we've had over 60 contributors to our codebase and we have new people showing up every week wanting to get involved. We've also been able to attract and hire amazingly talented people we would never have discovered if we were running a traditional hiring process.
Don't just open-source your code. Open-source your collaboration process too.
(1) https://www.originprotocol.com/discord
(2) https://github.com/orgs/OriginProtocol/projects/2
(3) https://meet.google.com/pws-cgyd-tqp (Every Wed at 1pm PT)
(4) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aRcAk_rEjRgd1BppzxZJK9RX...