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.
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Open and Async is the practical playbook for making remote and distributed work actually work—two habits, working in the open and communicating asynchronously, drawn from a decade of remote-first lessons at GitHub.
Tools alone won't make remote work succeed. Eight cultural rules for effective async communication, regardless of your industry or role.
When I joined GitHub in 2013, I found a company that had rethought how work happens. Thirteen years later, those lessons still shape how I work.
Unless absolutely required, avoid custom, modified, or non-standard open source licenses, which will serve as a barrier to downstream use of your code.
Async is what makes remote work actually work. It produces better outcomes, improves work-life balance, and unlocks flow beyond Cold War-era workflows.
Async communication is like gzip compression for humans—more upfront processing, but greater throughput with fewer packets.
CLAs create a hostile developer experience, require significant overhead, and are usually unnecessary given modern open source norms.
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.
Open source has always been about the right to modify, not contribute. As those workflows spread beyond software, we may need a new word.