The Origin Story of the InnerSource Hero

InnerSource Summit 2025

Transcript

1. The Origin Story of the InnerSource Hero Lessons from Practitioners on Core Values KDDI Agile Development Center Tomohiro NAKAJIMA
2. My Name is…
3. InnerSource Hero ※It’s photo time!
4. However,
5. InnerSource Hero takes off the mask because I am nearsighted. Just wait a moment… please enjoy listening
6. This is the true identity of InnerSource Hero.
7. Do You Know InnerSource Hero?
8. It’s an song about InnerSource You listened a moment ago. —- It’s a song about InnerSource. Today, I’ll share why we made this song, and what happened after.
9. Background I work at KDDI Agile Development Center,a digital innovation company born from KDDI, a telecom in Japan. We had over 200 engineers, but no real code collaboration across projects. I was developing a small retrospective tool in my spare time, but I didn’t know how to develop it together with other engineers in my company. I knew the word ‘InnerSource,’ and I wanted to try it, but it stayed a concept in my head —not a practice in our teams.
10. The Encounter and Beginning At Regional Scrum Gathering Tokyo 2024,I met Hattori-san from GitHub,who is also InnerSource Commons Foundation President. Through him, I got connected to InnerSource Commons community. In Japan, not many people know deeply about InnerSource yet. I make music as a hobby, With my background of creating songs to explain agile and retrospectives in the Scrum community, So I wanted to create a way to help more people discover it — in a fun, musical way. beginner expert hard to understand easy to understand Community members want to create contents in this area
11. Workshop Three Times We started by discussing the values of InnerSource. The main character is a manager and an engineer in the organization. someone who felt afraid to open their code,but didn’t want to rebuild the same thing again,and wished others could see and appreciate their work.
12. Workshop Three Times The conclusion was simple: ‘InnerSource starts with the courage to share your code inside your company.’ So we made a song about that message. The title is ‘Co-Creation Future: InnerSource Hero.’
13. InnerSource Gathering Tokyo 2024 We released this song. Many people were surprised. I received the Hero of the Month award from InnerSource Commons. I’m grateful for this honor.
14. Co-creation Future: InnerSource Hero - Lyrics I am the maintainer of the code I wrote. As I was living carefree, I found myself trapped in the corporate silo. With the way things are, new hires in the next year will also be trapped in the silo. Co-creation Future, InnerSource Hero!! I built my very own repository.Everyone should use this, it's no mystery. But I don't want the criticism, so I totally keep it to myself. One day I heard the team beside us is gonna start creating something just like what I made. What a shame! it sounds like reinventing the wheel. Updating README, now it's clear what this code does, what this file is for. CONTRIBUTING.md tells us that they are welcome to work on the code. Got a Star! Issue is created! Pull Request! Hooray! Open collaboration lead great benefit.Feedback brings us happiness. This song was brought to you by InnerSource Commons community and KDDI Agile Development Center. It’s a hero song about breaking silos. Here are the lyrics of the song. Let me explain what kind of discussions in the workshop led to these lyrics.
15. Lyrics - Introduction I am the maintainer of the code I wrote. As I was living carefree, I found myself trapped in the corporate silo. With the way things are, new hires in the next year will also be trapped in the silo. Co-creation Future, InnerSource Hero!! The main character is a manager who struggles with the corporate silo. Why was he trapped in the silo? The answer that came out in the workshop was “because he was living carefree.” He is also afraid that new employees next year will face the same problem.
16. Lyrics - Verse I built my very own repository.Everyone should use this, it's no mystery. But I don't want the criticism, so I totally keep it to myself. One day I heard the team beside us is gonna start creating something just like what I made. What a shame! it sounds like reinventing the wheel. The main character has his own repository, but he has not started InnerSource yet. He could share it, but he doesn’t. In the workshop, we talked about why this happens. We found the reason might be “I don’t want the criticism.” Yes — he is afraid to share it.
17. Lyrics - Chorus Updating README, now it's clear what this code does, what this file is for. CONTRIBUTING.md tells us that they are welcome to work on the code. Got a Star! Issue is created! Pull Request! Hooray! Open collaboration lead great benefit.Feedback brings us happiness. What is the first step of InnerSource? We discussed it in the workshop. The first step is to share your code and write README.md and CONTRIBUTING.md. This is described in the Standard Base Documentation of the InnerSource Patterns. It is important not only to show your code but also to say, “We welcome your contribution.” Many Japanese practitioners said the same. “Why can they keep doing it?” I asked. “Because feedback brings us happiness.” A culture where people praise each other is also very important in InnerSource.
18. You Can Watch the Video on YouTube This is our company’s official YouTube channel. InnerSource Hero is ranked No. 7. Please help increase the number of views!!!
19. Creating Music in InnerSource Way in my Company Everything — the vocal, arrangement, illustration and video — was created by our company’s employees, in InnerSource way, collaborating openly across teams.
20. What Happened? After I shared this workshop story in my company, my colleague sent a pull request to my Slack bot repo for the first time. I didn’t even have a CONTRIBUTING.md. But telling the song’s story became a signal — ‘I welcome contributions to this repo.’ Even without a document, that openness traveled, and a PR arrived. Feedback brought me happiness. This was my first InnerSource experience.
21. Internal Promotion of InnerSource That wasn’t All. Shimokawa-san from the Platform Engineering Department, who listened to this song, took the lead in promoting the development of InnerSource guidelines and the InnerSource portal. The term “InnerSource” has since spread widely throughout our company.
22. InnerSource Hero was loved by many people It even became a novelty item and continues to be used in the community. Oidate-san from Mitsubishi Electric used InnerSource Hero to promote InnerSource within his company.
23. What I Learned I used to think rules were important. But now I believe action is more powerful. InnerSource is not a system — it’s a culture. Just like music — when one starts singing, someone else joins in.
24. Closing Now, this song is played at several community events in Japan. InnerSource Commons,JAWS(AWS User Group),CEDEC 2024, etc. When you share your code with courage — remember — You are also an InnerSource Hero.
25. BY THE WAY…
26. My boss Kishida-san illustrated InnerSource Hero, and created the InnerSource Comic the day before yesterday
27. My boss Kishida-san illustrated InnerSource Hero, and created the InnerSource Comic the day before yesterday You can read this comic there: https://note.com/show_kichi/n/n8cfaa1514dad
28. You can read this comic in my boss’s blog!!!!! I want this moment to keep going. Please give us feedback
34. The Origin Story of the InnerSource Hero Lessons from Practitioners on Core Values KDDI Agile Development Center Tomohiro NAKAJIMA
35. The First Problem I shared my code inside the company Nobody used it No one maintained it I asked: How can I invite others?
36. Birth of the Hero • Joined InnerSource Gathering Tokyo team • People asked: “We need easy content for beginners” • I created a song and the character InnerSource Hero
37. My Learnings I learned 2 key values: 1. Publish what you create 2. Act to get feedback • After I shared the song on Slack → I got my first Pull Request!