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Employee open source projects – continued
This follows my last post about establishing a company policy in regards to open-source participation. Under the assumption that your company believes it to be beneficial and has approved the concept, this post offers ideas about how to manage open-source participation from the perspective of an IT manager.
In the end, your purpose is to facilitate productivity of your IT workers and secure systems in support of company goals. Consider the following aspects about managing the process.
Company secrets
It’s up to you to monitor for and prohibit release of trade secrets. You should differentiate between generic public-ready code and that which describes either how your widgets are made or confidential data access. Different builds and different packaging must exist for company assets and public assets.
Do not compromise your service level
Just because you allow an employee to submit software to the open source community does not mean that your company is the testing ground. Just as you wouldn’t let your company data leak out, you should not allow new software to leak into your production area. Frankly, it makes sense to let other people in the open source community take their chances first.
Public relations
To get the most direct PR benefit, your employee should clearly associate himself with your company whenever such an association looks appropriate. He should reference how he uses the software at your workplace, as in “Here at GoodStuff.com, we use the Django whiz-stats to build …”. This is no small point. You have a PR channel for your company to show itself as a technological leader and to foster interest in your workplace as an attractive employer. You, as a supervising manager will be seen as uncommonly astute by developers.
The flip side is avoiding any negative PR. You simply cannot allow your employee to be part of any flame-war or submit sub-par software. This means that you need to follow his work, at least his words, and hopefully perform an occasional code review yourself. Nobody is going to be impressed with your company unless the quality of work is good.
Use the project to promote the employee
Assuming that the open source project was selected in view of having utility to your company, make sure to use it – even if you don’t really need to. In meetings with his company peers, make sure to drop the ultimate stroke – “Oh, and you guys should know that the widget editor we are using was partly created by our own Tim Smith; thousands of people around the world now know our company because of his contribution.” Yes, Tim Smith will eat up the recognition.
Help your employee pick the project
There are two reasons to help pick the project. First, it tells the employee that you actually have an interest in his need to do this. Secondly, you cannot let your employee fail here any more than you would at work.
If the employee is not very experienced in contributing to an active project, make sure that he starts out with small steps in a big project, or a very small project if he’s going it alone. Web front-end technologies in particular pose an excellent venue for creating small but noticeable projects. Here are some ideas:
- jQuery plugins – these can be pretty simple, safely integrated, and very popular.
- CSS themes – the ultimate low-risk, high visibility combination.
- Tutorials – this also opens the possibility of something like a YouTube channel with many references to your company. And guess what, your employee may start doing high quality documentation and tutorials for internal use as a result.
If you are fortunate enough to have somebody else on staff that has been part of such a project, and you have a new guy about to try it, use the experienced one as a mentor in the process.
Your website’s JOBS tab
Lots of companies have a job or careers link on a public website. If you are hiring developers, why not mention that you support open-source and have links to the amazing contributions made by your employees. This has genuine clout with developers. Without paying one penny more in salary, you’ll be a more attractive employer than ABC company where a candidate suspects that he’ll be hired as an anonymous cubicle dweller.
Summary
Don’t just set it in motion and leave it. Check in on the progress. Assess how you can get the most out of it for your employee and your company. Because the motivation to take part in the project probably centered around some form of professional fulfillment, do what’s needed to make yourself and your company known as the supportive vehicle towards that fulfillment.
Thanks,
John Griffin
