Templates MVC (in documentation)

[jyavorska]

Problem to solve

Sometimes there are common activities that topics come up for, or you want to enforce generally a common set of questions or decision format.

Proposal

Supporting creating, using, and deleting decision and description templates, shared at the team level, that pre-populate the fields (presumably with some markdown structure, just like GitHub issues work) is interesting. We can start this by documenting some that people can manually copy and paste from the docs.

Some ideas we should include:

• Proposal of change to a document
• Create a document
• Collaborative review of some document
• Daily team standup
• Brainstorming
• Competitive analysis
• Plan an event
• Decision

https://fellow.app/meeting-templates/ also has other ideas. Notion maybe has good templates too.

Other details

• Feedback from Ray: Decision templates could help people who aren't great writers, who need help to organize their thoughts.

Permissions and Security

N/A

Documentation

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Links / references

N/A

[jyavorska]

From discussion with IM he had some ideas on the kinds of templates you might offer and how we can talk about the product in a more facilitated mode:

• A common refrain: "How do we get aligned? Add more meetings!", but this is an anti-pattern.
• Engineers hate meetings, #1 question is always "how can we do this async"
• Meetings are terrible, unstructured, no agendas. This is the most important problem for Isaac. Probably wouldn't use our first iteration because it's too discussion focused, it's another tool, and it would be easier to adopt something that's more transactional.
• Liberating Structures (https://www.liberatingstructures.com/) is an interesting source of templates, similar to Cynefin (https://cynefin.io/wiki/List_of_methods). Comes from Holacracy (https://medium.com/org-hacking/holacracys-integrative-decision-making-process-f750d4b82abc). https://github.com/red-hat-people-team/open-decision-framework/blob/master/maturity-model/Maturity-model-ODF.pdf is another interesting component related to decision making.
• Matija mentioned that what Isaac was describing is a lot like https://fellow.app/.
• The above line can be a way to avoid "Is this going to trigger another organizational-wide discussion about tools?". Publishing to another source of truth is an ok part of that story, but isn't enough, because the application still looks like another chat tool.
• The app looks more like a discussion tool than a outcome generating tool, and we should adjust that because even if we don't change the identity of the app it's still about generating outcomes.