Stop Rebuilding the Same Thing: Scaling Internal Collaboration with Open Source Operating Models
Thursday, September 10 at 14:20–14:45
In many organizations, teams say they collaborate, but the reality often looks different. Engineers across regions rebuild the same integrations, shared projects live on individual laptops, ownership is unclear, and pull requests take days or even weeks to merge. Even when teams try to adopt InnerSource, the lack of structure leads to fragmented efforts rather than real collaboration.
This talk shares how we are addressing these challenges by applying open source operating models internally. Instead of treating collaboration as a cultural aspiration, we treated it as a system: predictable contribution flows, clear ownership through maintainership, documentation that acts as policy, and governance that ensures sustainability.
Using Bento, a shared frontend library at Adyen, as a case study, I’ll walk through how open source practices transformed the way teams build and reuse internal tools. What started as another shared project evolved into a collaboration layer that reduced duplication, improved visibility, and enabled cross-team contributions at scale.
You’ll leave with a practical framework for scaling internal collaboration in your own organization, including what to standardize, how to structure contributions, and how to measure impact through developer experience signals such as onboarding time, review turnaround, and reuse.
Takeaways:
- how to identify when internal collaboration is failing in practice
- how to apply open source practices to structure internal projects for reuse
- how to design contribution models and maintainership for sustainability
- how to measure the impact of InnerSource on developer experience
