Building Your Internal Library Developer Community

In our previous post on inner source, we explored the concept of inner source and its benefits. Now, let’s tackle what I consider the most crucial aspect: building and nurturing the community of developers who will make your inner source initiative successful. Drawing from my experience both in open source and corporate environments, I’ll share practical strategies for creating a thriving internal library development community.

The Human Side of Inner Source

I learned early in my career that while technical infrastructure is necessary, it’s not enough. The success of your inner source initiative ultimately depends on people - developers who are willing to share their code, contribute to others’ projects, and collaborate across team boundaries. Let me share what I’ve learned about making this happen.

Creating Effective Incentive Structures

Early in my journey of building developer communities in large companies, I tried a lot of different things to get going.

What I’ve found works is creating an environment where sharing and collaboration happen naturally. To start with, we simply gave developers a platform to share their work. We organized monthly “Library Lightning Talks” where developers could showcase their solutions.

The real magic happened when we tied library development to career growth. We worked with HR to include library maintenance, usage, and cross-team collaboration in our promotion criteria. Suddenly, developers who had been quietly maintaining crucial internal tools were getting the recognition they deserved.

Discovery: Making Libraries Findable

One of my biggest frustrations in my early days of corporate development was not knowing what libraries already existed in our organization. I’d spend weeks building something, only to discover that another team had already solved the same problem. That’s why I’m passionate about making libraries discoverable.

We built what we called a community page - a central hub that went beyond just listing packages. It told stories about how different teams were using each library, the problems they solved, and the developers behind them. Think of it as a social network for code. When a new team joined the company, they could browse through this landscape and immediately see what building blocks were available to them.

This doesn’t need to be complex, you probably already have something like confluence, or an intranet: work with what you have.

Measuring Success Through Stories

While we tracked metrics like adoption rates and contribution numbers, the real measure of success came through stories. Like when a new team was able to launch their first service in record time because they could build on top of our shared components.

Looking Forward

Building a community isn’t a linear process - it’s a journey of continuous learning and adaptation. In our next post, I’ll share how we tackled the practical challenges of transitioning from siloed development to shared libraries, including the governance models that worked (and those that didn’t), security considerations, and how we standardized development practices without stifling innovation.

Remember: Communities grow one story, one contribution, and one connection at a time. Focus on creating value for developers and teams, and you’ll be amazed at what grows from those seeds.