openessence.io, why ?
There are 3 key reasons why openessence.io has been set up as a project:
- To capture how things are done, not just what they might produce. Organisations are now as interested in the approach as much as they are in the technology; they want to reproduce things so that they transform processes and culture.
- To ensure consistency of use and reuse to wide audience, in particular that activities can be used across different parts of an organisation. Reuse tends to focus on what has been done, rather than how it was done. Looking at how, maximises reuse.
- To provoke discussion on ways of working and culture within a technology organisation, partly to discuss whether a practice library is a viable approach in a technical organisation.
OpenEssence will focus on activities that form part of an Open Organisational approach, based around open source software.
In terms of naming, OpenEssence is a working project title and whilst one way of cataloguing and accessing the practice library it contains might be using SEMAT Essence, the use of the word ‘essence’ is more a reflection of what it is about; that is capturing the stuff that makes it work.
Context
The project is currently being run by a team from within Red Hat Consulting, which has in the past looked at practice libraries and the process of capturing ways of working and key techniques. These have achieved various amounts of success over the last few years but have contributed to the development of different customer solutions.
OpenEssence isn’t a new idea and draws from initiatives such as: - Red Hat Open Practice Library : a project that captures techniques and activities used within Red Hat Open Innovation Lab - Red Hat Architect Framework : an internal project from 2014 that look to define activities using SEMAT Essence - Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) practice library: a comprehensive practice library based on SEMAT Essence. - Other initiatives on open source culture, tooling and processes, such as opensource.com
Objectives
In the short term the aim is to record activities and techniques (see Terminology below) from within different organisations, with some structure in terms of layout.
- short term : to record different activities and techniques.
- medium term : categorise the activities and techniques using a number of different methods.
- longer term : devise different means of accessing and contributing to the practice library.
openessence.io is an upstream project and as such may not have a branded, polished look to the content.
Terminology
One thing a library needs, as well as content is common terminology and a means of finding things. Some form of easily accessible nomenclature is desirable and based on previous experience it’s good to keep this as simple as possible,
Here are 3 terms to bear in mind to start with: - technique : something that is done one or more times as part of the way you work; such as a Daily Standup. It may not itself change the state of the project nor have measureable outcomes - activity : something that is done that moves the state of a project forward in a measureable way. Something like Stakeholder Mapping does this. - practice : a collection of activities that are used by a group of people for a common purpose. Project Discovery, Agile etc would be examples of a practice.