Inspired by the post 15 rules for communicating at GitHub from a few years back, I spoke with Sam Glover from the Lawyerist podcast on how lawyers can adopt the workflows, tools, and philosophies of open source to make their legal practice more remote-friendly.
You can listen on iTunes or visit the podcast episode directly on Legal Talk Network.
To learn more about how GitHub uses GitHub for non-code things like legal and HR, this Fast Company article is a great read.
More to explore
You don't have to share your code to benefit from open source. Adopting open source workflows behind the firewall produces more modern software regardless.
Tools alone won't make remote work succeed. Eight cultural rules for effective async communication, regardless of your industry or role.
Small scheduling choices — writing dates unambiguously, including time zones, and building in breaks — make distributed teams feel included.
Async communication is like gzip compression for humans—more upfront processing, but greater throughput with fewer packets.
Open source communities ship code across geographies and timezones without managers. Their collaborative practices have lessons for all of us.
Async is what makes remote work actually work. It produces better outcomes, improves work-life balance, and unlocks flow beyond Cold War-era workflows.
Publishing code without fostering community isn't open source — it's disclosed source. True open source is a two-way relationship.
Open source has always been about the right to modify, not contribute. As those workflows spread beyond software, we may need a new word.
The best collaboration tools share four traits: open, linkable, asynchronous, and process-capturing. Are you working the way you'd like?