Let’s talk about participation. There is a continuum of participation in an InnerSource community. There are people not even aware of the community, newcomers which are aware of the community but have not yet used or contributed to the software, consumers which already use the software, Contributors who have made at least one contribution and Trusted Committers, who take responsibility for both the software and the community. As a Trusted Committer, you are responsible for moving individuals along this continuum and to uplevel their ability to make contributions. In that sense, Trusted Committers act as force multipliers in their community.
As indicated earlier, it is helpful for Trusted Committers to engage in marketing their product and their community in order to increase the number of newcomers and consumers. They should communicate opportunities for making contributions to consumers and try to elicit and align the interests of potential Contributors with those of the community. What often works well is if Contributors were able to work on something that made their day job easier, e.g. development tools and automation.
Finally, it is the Trusted Committer’s responsibility to identify Contributors with the potential to grow. They should foster and nurture that growth by getting Contributors excited for tackling challenging tasks and to mentor or coach them while they are performing them. This is, in our opinion, the noblest responsibility a Trusted Committer has. It is rewarding for both the Contributor and the Trusted Committer alike. We have heard from Trusted Committers that mentoring and seeing people level up their abilities more than makes up for the fact that they have less time to actually spend writing software.
As mentioned in the previous section, learning and personal growth are reasons why people join and stick around in an InnerSource community. Upleveling their Contributors is one of the most powerful tools Trusted Committers have at their disposal to increase the speed, output and longevity of their community. It is also one of the key arguments with which to convince management to allow their employees to participate in an InnerSource community, as that will make their employees more valuable to them, to the company overall and it will help retain top talent.
In summary, Trusted Committers need to attract new Contributors and level up their ability to make contributions. This activity ultimately levels up the community’s ability to create better software faster. They do so by communicating opportunities to make contributions and by helping and mentoring Contributors to grow