There was a point where I was pretty sure the idea was good and the problem was just that people weren’t getting it. I wanted any engineer to be able to contribute to any system, regardless of which team owns it. The model that makes open source work, applied inside the company.
I kept calling it an “internal open source community” and watching conversations go sideways. Open source means different things to different people. Open source means Linux. It means volunteers and public repos and the software you’re giving away. I was describing an internal practice, and people were hearing an external commitment. Too many conversations went a different way than I expected.
I found out later that this has a name. InnerSource. There’s a nonprofit, InnerSource Commons, that has been documenting this for years. PayPal runs an InnerSource program. Comcast and Bosch do too. The term is designed specifically for the context I was trying to describe: the open source contribution model, applied behind the firewall.
I haven’t pitched it under the new name yet, but “Inner” already reads differently even just rehearsing it in my head. It feels deliberate and bounded, instead of something people feel they need to correct me on. Having a nonprofit behind it and other companies’ case studies to point to should help too. It’s not just my label for a thing; it’s a practice with a track record.
The name isn’t the whole battle, though. What tends to land with leadership here is cost, not culture. Different teams keep reinventing the same solutions independently, and InnerSource gives that waste a structure. That’s the argument I’m building the actual pitch around, not retention or culture framing.
None of the rest is built yet. I think I want to start off with an internal version of the kudosboard that I have running on this site. However, I’ll kept completely separate from the public one I already have here. There’s no pilot running yet. And I still need to find an executive sponsor before any of this gets formal traction.
So, the idea didn’t need to change. Just the word for it.