Ant Group (fintech company with 25K employees) founded Open Source Program Office (OSPO) in 2021. It has been a roller coaster journey to nurture it as the company features primarily a B2B2C business model which doesn't rely heavily on Open Source successes.

Building long-lasting open source engagement can be a really challenging, yet rewarding journey. It all began as a technical strategic initiative with 1 individual working on it part time. After 3+ years, the company now has a dedicated OSPO team of 6+ people, a full fledged Open Source Technical Committee, featuring Open Source as a long term Technical Strategy, and starting this year began the global outreach work very seriously in 2024.

In this duo-speaker session, we'll share our learnings and reflections of building OSPO in a highly dynamic environment with constant challenges from leadership, peers, and difficulties for building sustainable ecosystem. It aims to provide valuable insights for foundation members, ecosystem players and project leads to work with large corporations, even more useful if there are cultural boundaries to break through.