Promoting Your Open Source Success

The Yahoo Open Source Program Office (OSPO) provides services to help engineers at Yahoo prepare code for external publication, promote projects, and build open source communities. If you are interested in open source collaboration, we are here to help. To get an overview of our program, vist the OSPO Welcome Page intranet page, chat with us on our internal Slack channel (#opensource), or send an email to ospo@.

This page highlights how the OSPO can help you be an awesome open source corporate citizen.

Step Zero: Planning for Success

An awesome open source corporate citizen is combination of two behavior sets:

Working well with the open source community. The open source community is collaborative. Successful open source engineers combine an element of bravery (putting your code out there) with humility (accepting the sting of a very helpful fix). We encourage you to show off your best skills as an engineer, and also as a team player, a listener, and someone who is open to discovering new solutions to difficult problems.
Working well with the OSPO as an employee. As an employee, we also need you to comply with our policies. We need to know what you are working on and ensure that we can step in and help if anything comes up that requires our help. This guide will highlight some of these policies you need to be aware of so that we can work together towards your success. With this as the foundation, we’ll then share the set of services we provide you and your projects to best promote them in the open source world.

Step 1: Your Profile

When interacting with public open source, you’ll use your personal GitHub account. Please list your GitHub ID on your Employee Profile page on the intranet. This also helps us when you eventually leave the company since we can then remove your ID from any privileged content that you should no longer have access to.
You must have two-factor authentication set up on your GitHub profile to be added to a managed GitHub organization.
Since we’re working with your personal GitHub account and understand that different people have different feelings about what they do or don’t share on the internet, let us clarify: You do not have to use your own real image as your avatar or your real name as the ID name. You can use just about any avatar and name that complies with GitHub’s policies, and that does not violate any company policy either. You don’t have to display an email address on your profile, but in some cases you will need to include your Yahoo email address in your profile (and you’d remove it when you leave the company). Your GitHub account is your account. However when you are using it for work related open source projects, you are figuratively “dressing for work” and your public actions are now a reflection of you as an employee too. If any of this poses a concern, please contact the OSPO and we’ll work this out with you.

For more details please see the resources page related to GitHub.

Step 2: Good Standing

Working as a corporate engineer who is also an open source developer means that you maintain a good standing with both the open source community and the company.

We encourage you to be an open source contributor, but we do not allow you to sign a contribution license without approval.
We will help you publish projects, but we do not allow you to publish proprietary or sensitive code without authorization.
We trust you are an excellent engineer, after all, we hired you. But we also expect that you ask the OSPO for help and keep us informed of any issue that comes up.

Step 3: Promoting You

One of the benefits of working on open source is that you get an opportunity to get recognition from your peers in the industry. We think it’s great that with hard work, you can become a hero at this company. With open source, you can become a hero at every company. We’ll help promote you, but we have to work together and with our PR department, to make this work.

We will help you publish blog articles or podcasts about Yahoo open source projects.
If your project warrants, we will help you with meetup and conference talks, as well as other industry outreach.
We will help coordinate meetups or hack events to support your open source community efforts.

Next Step

Now that we have you set up for open source success, check out the support services we provide for our open source projects.