Ant Group (fintech company with 25K employees) has been an active participant in Open Source community with many projects (AntV, EggJS, SOFAStack, etc), yet most projects were primarily governed and operated by Ant Group and we don't actively work with OSS Foundations, Apache Foundation included for a long time.

Founding Open Source Program Office (OSPO) and setting tailored OSS strategy has changed that. In 2023, Three Ant Group initiated projects entered Apache incubation and many of our internal engineers have built awareness and capabilities for working with the community, and Apache Way was a critical component for their learning.

The experience of building OSPO and facilitated 3 projects into Apache has taught me a lesson that in order to build long term open source practices and culture, you need more than trainings and education material. In this session, we share how principles, governance, mentorship and commercial knowledge can work together to get you there.