The Open Source Program Office is responsible for several mission critical tasks including managing: open source strategy, policy, open source in products, community contributions and engagements, attracting talent, and cross group collaboration.
Our program office was also tasked with “fostering grassroots innovation” by leveraging open source principles. Although our company staffs a formal research team, we wanted to obtain an additional boost by embracing the “scratch and itch” principle to empower employees at ALL levels. The value creation and cultural impact has been fantastic – creating new product features, new offerings, customer demos, improved processes, and compelling tradeshow presentations. We present the playbook and software we developed to support this mission (both available under Apache-2.0), and share several success stories (some of which you might find surprising).