What are best practices for professional open source contribution?

[dgkf]

Proposal

Contributing to open source software as part of a professional role presents challenges at the intersection of enterprise, personal and public relations interests.

Filing bug reports, communicating features and supporting public software come with a number of challenges that go far beyond the software itself:

• Who's on the hook when things go wrong? Me, my employer, the software maintainer?
• Should I keep my professional open source presence separate from my personal presence (separate accounts?)
  • What if my personal interests overlap with professional interests
    ie, my fun Tidy Tuesday analysis leads me to develop some data processing tools that I can also use in my clinical analysis and I want to add them to the pharmaverse
  • What if part of the value of contributing is building a public portfolio that I want to keep beyond my current employment?
• How do I contribute when my use of software is tightly coupled to internal (sensitive) processes?
  • Filing bug reports my expose process decisions that may draw scrutiny
  • Someone might see a flaw in our approach
  • There will be a public record and I (or my company) will look silly for asking
• If my company provides financial support (vendor/consortium/open source group), how do I balance my company's role as a sponsor against my role as a open source contributor?

Expected impact

Draft a "Pharma Open Source Contributor Guide" that provides guidance for some of these common questions.

Prior discussions/work

• Going from consumer of open-source to participants in active development positconf-roundtables-2023#10
• Who's responsible for our cross-pharma code? positconf-roundtables-2023#15

Would you be willing to potentially facilitate this discussion?

None