InnerSource fundamentals

Organizations of all sizes and in all industries are chatting about InnerSource concepts. This course walks you through some of the key concepts of InnerSource and helps you build up an internal toolkit for adopting InnerSource practices.

What you'll learn

After completing this course, you'll be able to:

• Contrast user versus organization owned projects
• Create discoverable repositories
• Create robust repository READMEs
• Use issue and pull request templates
• Make sensible configuration decisions for repositories, like using protected branches and CODEOWNERS
• Build transparency into repositories through well documented branching strategies, project management techniques, and workflow best practices
• Prioritize what matters when measuring InnerSource and collaboration
• Distribute your InnerSource toolkit

You'll be able to answer questions like:

• What is the difference between InnerSource and open source?
• How can my organization create repositories to organize work?
• How should my organization handle bug reports?
• How should I document my workflows to share with my team members?
• How do I measure success in my projects?

What you'll build

As we work, we'll create a resource that others can use within your organization. This repository will be useful even after you finish this course.

What you need to know

We assume in this course you understand GitHub terminology and concepts. If you need help with this, take our Introduction to GitHub. You'll also want a working understanding of GitHub Pages. We have a course on GitHub Pages as well. Finally, it helps if you have prior experience working on team project.

What tools we'll learn

For this course we'll use GitHub Pages and Jekyll.

Who this is for

This is the best course for someone working at a company or organization that already works InnerSource. Or for a company or organization that is transitioning to InnerSource. This would be a great course for a technical leader interested in bringing transformation to their workflows.

Most of the ideas here work for all repositories on GitHub. This course has some content specific to working within an organization. If you are an open-source maintainer or contributor, this course has content that would be useful.