# InnerSource Patterns WG - Report for Governance Meeting 2021-02

**Reporting Period:** 01/2021

## Mission

*Briefly describe what your project actually does.*

- Discuss community InnerSource practices and dynamics, collect and document agreed upon best practices of how to do InnerSource - in the form of patterns
- Continuously publish the most mature patterns as an ebook and website

## Project/Community Status and Health

*Sum up the status and health of your project and community*

- new contributors:
  - [@dterol23](https://github.com/dterol23)
- We are merging PRs with minor changes a bit faster already.
- We got more work to do to make contributions easier for new people joining the Patterns WG but we are on a good path.
- Activity and trusted committer diversity is too low to sustain the project in the long run on a high activity level. (Low activity evolution is sustainable.)

## Project Activity

*Describe the overall activity in the project over the reporting period.*

**Status: no changes/updates since last report**

- [InnerSource Patterns book](https://innersourcecommons.gitbook.io/innersource-patterns) is published automatically when new content is pushed to master - @spier
- Added automatic checks to keep the markdown files of the patterns clean
    - markdownlint - (#222, #263, thanks [@nschonni](https://github.com/nschonni))
    - Link Checker - @spier
    - Finding sensible trade-offs between too strict and too loose checks will be essential. We don't want to scare new contributors away with too many "rules". On the flip side putting some checks into place makes it explicit to contributors what we expect. The hope is that that would speed up some parts of the contribution process.
- Presented at the ISC 2020 APAC Summit: *Level up your InnerSource through Patterns* - @fwan2000, @spier - [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSCR13LF6Ww)
- Patterns office-hours concept try out, some success, dual time-zone meeting concept successfully in use in Marketing WG - @lenucksi
- Continuing to work with the new Maturity levels (initial, structured, validated)

### Pattern-work

- [Merged PRs](https://github.com/InnerSourceCommons/InnerSourcePatterns/pulls?q=is%3Apr+closed%3A2021-01-01..2021-01-31+is%3Amerged+): 18
  - Patterns (aka Content Work): 9 (PRs only)
      - #245 Expand RFC Pattern (@tsadler1988)
      - #166 initial checkin of concept-anchor (@mishari)
      - #71 Create include-product-owners.md (@NewMexicoKid)
      - #74 Create assisted_compliance.md (@NewMexicoKid)
  - Non-pattern work: 9 (PRs only)
      - getting the overview of patterns in the main README into a better shape #254 and #259
- [New PRs created](https://github.com/InnerSourceCommons/InnerSourcePatterns/pulls?q=is%3Apr+created%3A2021-01-01..2021-01-31): 15
- [New Issues created](https://github.com/InnerSourceCommons/InnerSourcePatterns/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+created%3A2021-01-01..2021-01-31): 6
- [Issues Closed](https://github.com/InnerSourceCommons/InnerSourcePatterns/issues?q=is%3Aissue+closed%3A2021-01-01..2021-01-31): 2

## Plans of the Project

*Describe the current plans of the project. Include goals the project is working towards as well as any announcements that should be published through the Marketing working group.*

**Status: no changes/updates since last report**

- Improve [InnerSource Patterns ebook](https://innersourcecommons.gitbook.io/innersource-patterns) further:
    - #250 Nicer domain for the book (getting help from @cewilliams)
    - Analytics to understand readership better
- Content
    - Start [Pattern of the Month](https://github.com/InnerSourceCommons/InnerSourcePatterns/pull/280) as a way to improve one pattern at a time. Do some marketing around the patterns together with the Marketing WG, and motivate new people to contribute.
    - Evaluate ideas to further facilitate collection of pattern content (e.g. through automation), channel ongoing discussions into pattern-work
    - Attract more contributors, e.g. by lowering the barriers of entry
    - Level up some patterns to higher maturity levels. e.g. the [InnerSource Portal](https://github.com/InnerSourceCommons/InnerSourcePatterns/blob/master/patterns/2-structured/innersource-portal.md) has multiple known instances and even a reference implementation now, so it could be brought to maturity "Validated" relatively easily.
- Process / Maintenance
    - Onboard further trusted committers
    - Process existing content from PRs and Google group into our repository (once that is done we can focus on the contribution process via the GitHub repo exclusively)

## Last Committer Addition

*When was the last committer added to the project? A healthy project tends to add new committers regularly. The report should indicate the most recent date on which a committer was added.*

**Status: no changes/updates since last report**

- 11th of December 2020: @spier
- 24th of April 2020: @lenucksi

## Committer Diversity

*Cover committer diversity in your project. A healthy project should survive the departure of any single contributor or employer of contributors. What are your steps to make sure that people from all regions on the globe can participate in your project without having to be awake at midnight their local time?*

- Focus on asynchronous collaboration in the #innersource-patterns channel and in the GitHub repo
- Offering office hours on APAC and EU/Americas time slots (@mishari has started to help with the APAC one, also looking to organize a meetup potentially)
- Work towards automation of administration tasks, documentation of processes
- Have Trusted Committers in multiple time zones

## Legal Issues & Other Needs

*Are there any project branding or naming issues, either in the project or externally? Any legal issues? Any infrastructure or strategic needs?*

**Status: no changes/updates since last report**

- **Google Analytics** - can we use it to track readership statistics for our book? (gitbook.com providers Google Analytics tracking natively)
- **Custom Domain** for the book: Out of the box, the book will live at `innersourcecommons.gitbook.io/innersource-patterns`. If we want a custom domain e.g. to drive traffic to innersourcecommons.org, we would have to configure the DNS for a custom domain. Not sure what is possible but e.g. something like `patterns.innersourcecommons.org/` or `books.innersourcecommons.org/innersource-patterns`. Already connected with @cewilliams about this.
- Suggestions welcome on how to attract more contributors.
- Legal: None currently, book illustrations will trigger IP compliance requirements.

## Any issues for the Board to act on?

- None
