Circle Communities
InnerSource adoption is slow in organizations due to limited understanding, engagement, and contextual relevance. Circle Communities address this by fostering synchronous conversations that build connections, close knowledge gaps, and cultivate collaboration and continuous learning.
Organizations face several challenges in building individual understanding around InnerSource and ensuring the diffusion of fresh ideas and practices beyond isolated innovators and innovation teams. These challenges include:
- Lack of Contextual Understanding: Employees often struggle to connect InnerSource practices with the core principles of openness, transparency, prioritized mentorship, and voluntary code contribution, hindering their learning process.
- Knowledge Gaps: Significant gaps exist between what individuals know and what they need to learn about InnerSource patterns and practices, making meaningful engagement difficult.
- Engagement Issues: Without predictable and structured opportunities for synchronous conversations, engagement and participation can be low, leaving mindset and behavioral changes unsupported.
- Limited Expertise: Organizations may lack confident and knowledgeable individuals to facilitate discussions and bridge knowledge gaps, especially in embodying InnerSource principles in practice.
- Lack of Connection: Isolated innovators and innovation teams often work independently and lack opportunities to support each other in addressing the bespoke challenges they encounter in their InnerSource journeys.
- Scenario 1: Few people with extensive InnerSource knowledge exist within your heavily siloed organization. The practice has struggled to build sustainable engagement as the culture is not hospitable to open collaboration and innovation, and principles like openness and transparency are not embedded in day-to-day interactions.
- Scenario 2: Your organization is decentralized, and isolated innovators and innovation teams pursue InnerSource initiatives independently. Stakeholders are often unaware of parallel efforts, limiting opportunities to align on shared goals, practices, or resources. This lack of connection leaves them without mutual support to address the bespoke challenges they face.
The following factors make solving these problems difficult:
- Complexity of Understanding: InnerSource principles can feel abstract, especially for those new to the concept or lacking mentorship, making it difficult to connect patterns and practices to the principles.
- Mindset Gaps: Adopting InnerSource requires shifts in mindset, such as embracing openness, transparency, and voluntary contribution, which are not always intuitive in traditional organizational cultures.
- Lack of Structured Engagement Opportunities: Without formal or recurring spaces for discussions, participation and the reinforcement of behavioral change remain inconsistent.
- Limited Access to Expertise: Few knowledgeable individuals can consistently bridge gaps, model the principles, or guide others in grounding practices into the principles.
- Cultural Barriers: Siloed or decentralized cultures resist open collaboration, transparency, and mentorship, which are foundational to InnerSource.
Circle Communities for InnerSource provide a collaborative forum that connects isolated innovators and innovation teams, enabling them to support each other in addressing bespoke challenges while aligning practices with InnerSource principles. Key elements of this solution include:
- Principle-Centered Facilitation: Dedicated leaders and community members ensure that meetings embody openness, transparency, prioritized mentorship, and voluntary contribution. They guide discussions to connect practices and patterns back to these principles, helping participants move forward with their initiatives and challenges.
- Building Connections Across Silos: Meetings prioritize creating connections among isolated innovators and innovation teams who may be unaware of parallel efforts in the organization. These connections foster mutual support and shared learning to address bespoke challenges collaboratively.
- Meeting Participants Where They Are: Each meeting addresses the needs of attendees, focusing on helping newcomers and recurring participants get unstuck, clarify their understanding of InnerSource principles, and tackle specific challenges they encounter.
- Support for Mindset Shifts: Conversations foster mindset changes necessary for InnerSource success, such as cultivating openness, addressing barriers to transparency, and encouraging voluntary contributions and mentorship behaviors.
- Flexible Meeting Flow: Meetings are not prescriptive presentations. Instead, they provide a space for attendees to explore challenges, ask questions, and share early curiosity or struggles, with discussions anchored in InnerSource principles.
- Agreed Meeting Agenda: Each meeting’s agenda is collaboratively decided by the group, ensuring productivity and relevance. In cases where consensus is not reached, decisions defer to the dedicated leaders for guidance and facilitation.
- Real-World Examples: Participants are encouraged to share specific examples of successes and challenges in applying InnerSource principles, providing practical learning opportunities for the community.
- Knowledge Sharing and Best Practices: Discussions include reviewing best practices such as how to promote openness in code review, establish transparent governance, or mentor contributors effectively.
To nurture Circle Communities, implement these practices:
- Define the Purpose: Clearly articulate goals and align them with the organization's mission.
- Establish Social Conventions: Develop guidelines to promote respect, inclusivity, and open dialogue, evolving them over time.
- Facilitate Regular Meetings: Schedule consistent meetings for progress discussions, insight sharing, and collaborative problem-solving.
- Rotate Leadership: Encourage shared leadership to distribute responsibility and deepen member connections.
- Leverage Collaborative Tools: Use tools like Slack or GitHub to facilitate communication, documentation, and privacy-preserving insights sharing.
- Foster Continuous Improvement: Solicit regular feedback to refine the community's activities and structure.
Circle Communities create an environment where individuals and teams collaboratively explore InnerSource principles and practices, leading to tangible improvements in mindset, behavior, and organizational culture. By fostering connections across silos and providing structured opportunities for dialogue, these communities enable:
- Practical Understanding: Participants gain actionable insights by relating principles to real-world scenarios, bridging the gap between theory and practice.
- Collaborative Problem-Solving: Members address challenges collectively, leveraging diverse perspectives to overcome barriers and refine their approaches.
- Cultural Integration: Core values like openness, transparency, and mentorship become embedded in day-to-day work, supporting sustained organizational transformation.
- Knowledge Flow: Ideas, experiences, and best practices circulate freely, reducing knowledge gaps and sparking continuous learning.
- Supportive Networks: Strong relationships form among innovators, fostering a sense of mutual accountability and shared purpose.
- Sustained Engagement: Flexible meeting formats and participant-driven agendas ensure relevance and encourage ongoing involvement.
Ultimately, Circle Communities help organizations scale InnerSource adoption by cultivating a culture of continuous learning, collaboration, and innovation, transforming both individual mindsets and systemic practices.
- InnerSource Dojo from SAP
- Unplugged InnerSource sessions within the Reuse & InnerSource workgroup of SAP Cross-Platform Architecture
- Guilds at the BBC
- Initial
- Guilherme Dellagustin
- InnerSource Dojo from SAP:
- Nick Basil
- Allison Kaufmann