At Compare the Market we encourage and support self-organising communities. One such community which formed was the open-source group. This was established from a desire to give back to the wider open-source community from which we gain so much.
The open-source group in Compare the Market is passionate about ensuring that open-source projects receive reciprocal benefits when we use them. One initiative that they have recently introduced is the open source donation process. This process exists to allow teams to make financial donations, or “tips”, to the open-source projects on which their software relies. Through this process anyone in the company can request a donation to a project, which triggers a review and prompt payment when approved.
By giving something back, we help keep the open-source community healthy and the software we depend on maintained. It is also a great way to recognise the hard work that people have put into these projects.
With the successful set up of the tipping process under their belts, the open-source group is now looking at other areas where they can help. They are currently setting guidelines around contributing to open-source projects; making it as easy for our engineers to request changes to open-source projects as it is for them to inner-source work. They’re also looking to support and encourage our engineers to open source our in-house projects. In the course of our work, our engineers often create tools and applications which can be used more widely and we want to make it easy for our engineers to do more of this.
The open-source community in Compare the Market is very ambitious and determined and I’m sure we’ll be seeing lots more great ideas come out of that group.
Whatever your specialist area, wherever you are in your journey, we’d love to hear from you.
