Session: An Innovative Approach to Giving Back to Open Source Projects That Power Your Business
At this point there’s a strong consensus that all companies use Open Source tools and software. However, in the institutional context giving back and making an investment in the technology that powers their business can be far from straightforward.
In this talk we’ll dive deep into the story of how Matt’s team at Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) made the decision to adopt a suite of open source tooling and how they came to find an innovative way to substantially give back to these projects that now power their business,
Whilst much of the adoption is in the technology department tech-savvy enterprises are increasingly thinking about how to democratize access to tech, tools and data across their business. An example at RBC Global Asset Management is the team’s goal to enable investment professionals to leverage Python for analytics and modeling, to allow them to move beyond the traditional limitations of tools like Excel. As a curated experience with a host of useful plugins, open source tools JupyterHub and Jupyter notebooks provide a consistent environment for analysts anywhere to enable this ‘self-serve journey’.
Use and adoption of this open source tech was a no-brainer with a wealth of benefits, but finding mechanisms to give back to the project and maintainers can prove to be much more difficult with common challenges around resourcing, operations and company politics.
To solve this, Matt and his team decided to engage an external open source program as a mechanism to provide engineering resources back to the open source project that they use and rely on.There are many benefits to an outsourced approach, from participating in technical roadmap, issue identification, and prioritizing work that will have the biggest impact. They landed on working with Major League Hacking (MLH) and sponsorship of MLH Fellows to work on JupyterLab-Git is now in its third year!
Matt from RBC, and Max from MLH, will talk about how this partnership came about, the direct technical impact, and the benefits in terms of seeding the next generation of open source enthusiasts and contributors, and a proven new pipeline of engineering talent.
