Mad Devs Enhancement Proposals: How the Rules of Open Source Communities Can Help Your Company
Horizontal company structures and techniques that encourage company-wide ideation processes are today's defaults in the IT world. Everyone wants to hear back from employees without making every staff member to read a pile of books. It doesn't work that way, you need to keep corporate democracy simple.
We ended up introducing Mad Devs Enhancement Proposals (a.k.a. MEPs). We borrowed it from the leading IT communities (enhancement proposals exist in Debian, Python, JDK, Ruby developer groups). What is it like? Every community member can document their idea, be it AWS certification for everyone on the Infrastructure Team or improvement of cookie supplies at the office kitchen. Once the idea is documented in Confluence, an all-company voting begins. If the idea reflects the needs of a group of people within Mad Devs and is approved by top management, we implement it closing the MEP task and, more importantly, making our people happier.
MEPs help us measure the 'company temperature' easily and efficiently. Everyone feels welcome. Ideas don't get lost. So we recommend MEPs as a simple flow encouraging company innovators to go as far as they can. Trust your employees and give them multiple tools to change your company for the better!
This is the real screenshot of the real MEPs of Mad Devs:
