Meet the team that is collaborating on open source projects at the MS Open Tech Hub

From Jean Paoli

Since we launched Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. (MS Open Tech) as a subsidiary, project ideas have poured into our team from inside and outside the company as we shipped many open source projects and participated in many open standards activities.

After a few months of existence I want to provide you some insights on how we are functioning internally: we are working on many projects and are hiring ten full time employees: we are hiring developers, technical program managers, standards professionals and  technical evangelists! We will be posting the jobs descriptions in a few weeks (and will update this blog with a link to apply).

We have also been thinking about how to scale in order to be able to work across the many projects that could be interesting to MS Open Tech, Microsoft, and to the industry as a whole.

I am pleased today to introduce the MS Open Tech Hub (the Hub):

We created the Hub as new engineering program for MS Open Tech engineers: It is a collaborative place to build open source projects, exchange and evolve open source engineering best practices, and marshal and temporarily assign resources from Microsoft to MS Open Tech (in addition to MS Open Tech full time employees) based on the needs of specific projects.

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As the photograph above shows, the entire MS Open Tech team is excited and energized around the announcement of the Hub.

The number one goal of the Hub is to build, accept contributions or contribute to open source projects. Based on the needs of open source projects, engineering resources from Microsoft teams may be temporarily assigned to MS Open Tech to participate in the Hub, where they will collaborate with the community, work with the MS Open Tech full time employees and contribute to MS Open Tech projects. This collaboration will further help us exchange and evolve open source engineering best practices for open source.

The goal of the MS Open Tech Hub is to create a pool of talent where developers, testers, architects and others push boundaries, explore the toughest questions, and advance our investment in openness. The Hub brings together some of our best and brightest engineers to join together, work with the open community and toward the ultimate goal – building, accepting and contributing to interoperability, standards and open source projects.

For example, the Entity Framework team joined the MS Open Tech Hub, and brought today’s open source Entity Framework project to life. This team was able to quickly organize engineering and open development resources to be ready to start collaborating with the open source communities. EF will join the other open source components of Microsoft’s dev tools and frameworks – MVC, Web API, and Web Pages with Razor Syntax – to help increase development transparency for this project.

Get to know our team and find out what they like about collaborating in the Hub.

We’ve learned through the years that great ideas happen when smart, passionate and creative people come together in a collaborative environment that enables new ideas to flourish.

A few photos of a typical day in the MS Open Tech Hub

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Jean Paoli
President
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.
A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation