May 2017 NYCDevOps Meeting Notes

Here are my notes from last night's NYCDevOps meeting.

Title: Using innersourcing to break down organizational barriers
Speaker: Aroon Gursahaney, Verizon

This was one of the best talks I've seen in a while because it was entirely new material for me. I haven't heard of a company doing anything like this.

Last night I learned:

• You can replace legacy systems by crowdsourcing parts of the project to people around the company in exchange for giving them the opportunity to learn new technologies, tools, and devops practices
• You can gamify culture change in an organization
• You cam make crowdsourcing the norm, not the exception.
• Money motivates but a bigger motivation is interesting projects and the opportunity to learn, and to do something new.
• 21 teams. 12 outside his VP's organization, 106 people participated.
• In 2 days of the game, 2 months of progress was made on the project.
• People took tasks not in their expertise areas, but where they could learn the most.
• Seeing your code in production in other people's projects is a big source of pride, which is a big source of motivation.

Next month's speaker will be announced soon on the NYCDevOps meetup page.