Open sourcing our team wisdom

We want to share as much as we can from our insights that we gained at Tesselo. Some of the most tangible outcomes are code and written documents that we accumulated. Whatever is not personal or infringes non-disclosure agreements can be shared in principle. Here is a proposal for a process on how to do it.

Ask for permission

Before publishing anything, the people involved should be asked for their permission, even if they are not the owner of the intellectual property. It is still their work and publishing it will have some implications for their public persona. Hopefully these implications are desired and positive, but each individual should be able to decide for themselves.

Making GitHub repositories public

Technically this is simple, it requires adding a license to the repository and clicking a checkbox on GitHub. However, the implications are quite large for repositories with many commits and pull requests. All contributions that people made to the repository will be publicly visible.

• Advantage: all coders involved become an open source contributors
• Risk: interactions and code quality will be publicly visible

An alternative is to create a new repository and push the code there. Like this the contributions will become public, but not the interaction that lead to them.

To see our published repositories, head over to Tesselo’s GitHub page.

Publishing team agreements

Throughout our work we have developed interesting documents such as team agreements on how to operate. These documents live on Bahamut, our shared wiki. The agreements might be relevant for our team members in their new contexts, and possibly other teams as well. Publishing the agreements will make it easier to re-use them in the future.