Advantages of being open

People from other professional fields have always asked why the tech community is a closed one. For them, this rests on obvious situations, such as the few women involved in the field, introverted people working with code, or the poor social skills that define a lot of us. But there are non-obvious, high-impact actors that can defend it as an open and transparent community.

Take the Internet as a reference: such a powerful engineering artifact that grew unstoppably because of the decision to share its protocols and let anyone plug into the network following the right standards. Nowadays, anything is connected to the Internet using different tools, allowing anyone to share whatever they want.

As a company, we have faced challenges since the beginning of our existence. Many of those have been solved thanks to the tech community: an open and wide group of people sharing knowledge and tools with the world for learning and collaboration purposes. We couldn’t be what we are today if we hadn’t had that access in the past. We do the same today: we care about being kind and open with the world. Letting others see what we are doing in a transparent way has provided more benefits than we expected. Besides, we realized during this involvement that there is no harm in sharing our work, because the difference comes from those behind the execution of that open knowledge.

There are no tangible or explicitly measurable insights about the benefits of open source, such as ROI in specific distribution channels or impact on a target market, among others; what we know is that the mantra behind our core value of Kindness can lead to different advantages that provide unique long-term benefits.

Passion for the things we do

What else can carry as much passion for the work you do as giving back to the community something they can use or talk about? Being passionate about what you do means talking about it, whether it’s the weekend, you’re on vacation, or you’re on a date. Passion is what drives the craziest but most significant advancements in the world.

Sharing your tools, your code, or your design is a way to talk to others at every single moment, letting them know you care about technology, creativity, and collaboration.

A new distribution channel

My co-founder is the author of a book: APIs on Rails, a piece that was started for fun, but also because there were many gaps in the existing sources for learning how to build a service architecture on Rails. Taking advantage of open tools and communities that share knowledge in different ways, he was able to distribute the book in electronic and print formats. This book has been a backup of our knowledge in the Internet century, where everything is eventually going to be connected.

It is a cover letter for our leads, a training tool for our hires, and a passionate showcase that has attracted attention from many people wanting to know more about this topic and about the company.

Understanding collaboration

I am not saying we don’t already collaborate inside the company, but sharing what you do demands another type of collaboration. An open, decentralized, distributed, and very organized core team needs to be behind every commit, every release, or version. Collaborating with people around the globe, speaking many different languages and following a personal standard on a project, can be a hassle, but if you attract the right people because of the existence of that project, collaboration will happen as a matter of course. Without the existence of GitHub, Bitbucket, or many other distributed revision control systems, this would be harder to imagine, but now it’s easier.

Understanding collaboration means working with new or existing members in an organized and distributed way, no matter the project.

Individual growth and recognition

We try to encourage every member of our team to share something with the world. That can be in the form of a blog post or a picture on our social networks, but most importantly, open source tools and open design within the creative communities. We had a problem trying to convince the team to share those under the /icalialabs namespace on the different networks. For instance, how can you encourage any team member to publish an open source tool on behalf of the company rather than under their own username?

The answer is simple but was complex to define. When you share a tool on your own, you need to define a strategy to distribute it, to let other people know about your work, and to connect with them constantly. When you get support from your company, the company can’t say no to using a tool made by a team member. Our company is committed to using it, growing it, and sharing it with the world. An open source tool in the company’s namespace can have a greater reach than one published alone, simply because a company is the sum of every individual in it. Of course, there’s going to be personal growth, and that’s something attractive for anyone collaborating in open source. Nowadays, many huge companies ask for your GitHub account to see your open projects. With the backing of the company’s reach, satisfaction and recognition can be higher.

Continuous feedback

We have faced some constraints, with a couple of clients rejecting the possibility of sharing any kind of design with the world. This is completely understandable when there’s a board, investors, or intellectual property involved. In contrast, on projects without bureaucracy, clients are willing to share those efforts, and the results have been rewarding. People within open online communities get inspiration in many ways, but they are also looking to discuss, comment on, and give feedback to anyone sharing there. Talent is obviously all around the world, working on different products and teams, but at the same time it is connected to anyone because of the Internet. The possibility of receiving feedback from any expert or enthusiast about the work you are doing helps you grow and add more value to what you are building.

When we released Furatto, we posted the link on Hacker News on a Friday. In less than 3 hours, we received comments from 3 different front-end developers involved in huge and interesting projects such as Pure CSS. The conversation helped us identify improvements and question ourselves about the project itself.

Technical advancement

A couple of weeks ago, we had some meetings with seasoned people from very different software industries, products, and procedures, who argued that certifications were cool because of the backing you get from being supported by a monster such as Oracle or IBM.

We do the opposite: we are not attached to certifications or closed source tools. Technology is improving and changing every day. Being locked into one tool that is backed by a 3-year certification document can be dangerous and toxic to the progress our company needs, because of the rapid acceleration happening in the tech field. All the open source communities are aware of this; that’s why we see new languages and frameworks—options, in the end—that let anyone enter the tech jungle, fight for a different goal, and propose whatever they want. They can leverage the same things as the big fish. Advances come from being open.

For this specific advantage, I would like to cite what I read in How Google Works:

“Open-sourcing something says, in effect, that we are committed to growing a platform, an industry, and an ecosystem as a whole. It lets everyone see that the playing field is level, with no unfair advantages conferred upon any particular player. Removing this suspicion of unfair advantages helps growth”. (Schmidt & Rosenberg, 2014)

Credibility for the company

Being a Latin American company competing in a worldwide market is very hard, and even harder when you see how difficult it is to attract talent and fight against the numbers revealing the low number of engineers and tech people in LatAm, the region with the smallest supply of profiles. Nevertheless, developing reusable tools that reduce time-to-market for our products and services has become a reference point for our expertise compared to other companies. By showing leads and clients the quality of our code and our vision for specific tools, we show them that we stand behind what we sell and what we do.

A couple of current clients have engaged with the code we have made public in our GitHub account, or looked at our design style on Dribbble. Sharing what you do every day will help others realize your potential as a team.

There can be exceptions when it comes to opening something to the world. The main factors involved in deciding whether to open something can be the quality you are looking for in the tool, legal restrictions from customers, or the 10x better-factor advantage over any other tools or products available. Nevertheless, we don’t regret having Kindness as one of our core values, inspiring our team to commit to sharing and being open with the community and the world.