How to Start a Working Doc

From Open Source Ecology
Jump to: navigation, search

Introduction

Often in OSE development you will hear, 'let's start a working document'.

What does that mean? It means, specifically, a Google Slides, using the Presentation Template, embedded in your Work Log, on the current topic of exploration. We start Working Docs as a place where we do technical diligence, past pictures, create diagrams, and otherwise develop any aspect of a development project. The relevance is not only keeping a paper trail so you can remember what you have explored - but also - for others to learn from. We treat a working doc as a place where we begin distilling vast amounts of potential information into that which results in a completed product and enterprise.


Include an edit link below the document (such as at Presentation Template) - so that others can edit the document, because otherwise one cannot access edit mode and you'll be working on that document on your own.

There are several keys to making sure that this document is completely open and collaborative, and therefore which could become part of a large-scale, open, collaborative development effort.

  1. Go into permissions and make sure the permissions are set to 'anyone can edit' the document. This is important. So that you don't have to grant individual permissions to users. Go ahead, that is how we work. Otherwise, if you had a large team (and our team is the whole world), the collaboration process would not scale simply because it would take too much admin time just to add everyone to the document. We'd rather be creating, not doing admin work.
  2. Make sure that this document is Findable to other team members

Note that the same principles apply to Google Spreasheets, which we use for BOMs.

12 Critical Elements of a Working Doc

  • This working doc has these elements of information architecture:

edit

Future Work

  • Once we have a full OSE Icon Set - such as started at Icon Source - Working Docs should use icons to clarify content types, to create diagrams, etc...
  • See how icons and work docs fit into massive parallel development - Extreme_Enterprise_Role_Architecture#CAD_Role_Architecture. Don't worry if this doesn't make sense to you initially, as you get familiar with the full set of open, collaborative development protocols, this will become obvious.


Exercise

  • To show that you know how to start a working doc- start a working doc as described above.