Repository navigation
categories to help IS pattern discovery #150
Description
It's great to see so many IS patterns from the community. A good problem we have is how to make these patterns easy for discovery/consumption. Here's some thought for discussion.
One pair is management and empowerment. Some patterns help to manage, govern, mitigate risk. Some other patterns help to empower, attract, build communities. This categorization can help others to quickly find the group of patterns that fit their needs.
Another angle is single project vs organization. Some patterns are applicable to single project, while others are organizational effort. For people working on specific initiative, single project level patterns might be more interesting. For people working on scaling IS, organizational patterns are important.
Thoughts? Comments?
Activity
NewMexicoKid commentedon Apr 21, 2020
This is where a pattern language can be helpful. See, for instance, my 2018 presentation on this. There are many different directions that can be taken and, as long as they are useful and can be maintained, I believe that we should explore them.
fwan2000 commentedon Apr 22, 2020
@NewMexicoKid Great presentation! I like the idea of using pattern language. I'd like to explore them further.
One thought is we can experiment mind map to get a feeling on how these patterns can tie together and we could have multiple maps for different major topic.
Here's an attempt to build a subset mind map from your slide 15.
fwan2000 commentedon Apr 24, 2020
Here's another draft with more patterns included. Can you provide feedback? Would love to have a discussion to explore this further.
fwan2000 commentedon Apr 24, 2020
There could be many other ways to group the patterns. Above draft is an attempt to group them by phase of program and challenges in each phase.
spier commentedon Apr 24, 2020
This is an interesting idea. I am thinking about it like a different table of contents when you are reading a book. With the pattern information that we have today, we can only list them alphabetically. With your idea we can group them along other categories, as shown by you.
So that I understand what you want to achieve, let's fast forward for a second:
Assuming this was completely finished, and you had a visualization that groups all patterns according to some categories. What would do you recommend we do with this visualization? e.g. where should it be published, how would it be found be readers of the patterns, etc?
maxcapraro commentedon Apr 24, 2020
Thanks for this contribution @fwan2000 :)
One thing we should keep in mind is the thoughts that others brought to paper here: https://github.com/InnerSourceCommons/InnerSourcePatterns/blob/master/pattern-system.md
fwan2000 commentedon Apr 24, 2020
I recommend to use this kind of visualization in overview section of patterns. Can be published as part of the ebook, and added to https://innersourcecommons.org/ patterns page. It can provide a high level overview of what patterns we have before they decide which patterns they want to dive deeper.
NewMexicoKid commentedon Apr 24, 2020
fwan2000 commentedon Apr 26, 2020
Agree. We could have multiple visualization schemes based on https://github.com/InnerSourceCommons/InnerSourcePatterns/blob/master/pattern-system.md to help organizing/filtering the patterns.
It also helps the contributors to collaborate with common pattern languages and identify areas that need more focus. For example, we can have a scheme listing all patterns in different state, and use P/R/D (Proven/Review/Donut) indicating their status.
fwan2000 commentedon Apr 27, 2020
Here's an attempt to turn the mindmap as a markdown file for easy collaboration.
https://github.com/fwan2000/InnerSourcePatterns/blob/mindmap/IS.md
Here's the svg file created from the md file using Atom plugin.
What do you guys think?
fwan2000 commentedon Apr 27, 2020
Here's the Atom plugin for mindmap creation: https://atom.io/packages/markdown-mindmap
Same author also has an open source javascript library that can visualize MD file as mindmap on website: https://github.com/dundalek/markmap
rrrutledge commentedon May 1, 2020
Think of labels or dimensions rather than a strict hierarchy. I can apply any number of labels in multiple dimensions to filter just those patterns that have those labels. These labels from different dimensions could be applied in potentially any combination.
fwan2000 commentedon May 5, 2020
@rrrutledge Agree the labels and different dimensions can provide a lot flexibility. The example here is just one way of organizing the patterns as a mind map. There can be multiple ways of organizing them. Here's another example attempting to organize patterns based on https://github.com/InnerSourceCommons/InnerSourcePatterns/blob/master/meta/pattern-system.md#tim-yao for IS projects that are products. @NewMexicoKid Does this reflect what you were thinking in the pattern system? Comments/suggestions?
spier commentedon Dec 14, 2020
@fwan2000 would you consider this issue done already by your work on the pattern categorization in https://github.com/InnerSourceCommons/InnerSourcePatterns/tree/master/pattern-categorization? If yes, feel free to go ahead and close the issue :)
fwan2000 commentedon Dec 16, 2020
Yes the work is done for the scope in this issue. I will close it.
It's been such an amazing experience working with you all on getting this issue implemented! Thank you @spier @NewMexicoKid @lenucksi !
spier commentedon Dec 16, 2020
And you did amazing in identifying a need, ideating a solution and putting it into practice in short iterations.
And look where it got you to, you are now a star in the APAC region after our last summit 👍
So thank you @fwan2000 !