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Problem: C4Social process needs a synopsis and introductory text #8

Closed aschrijver closed 3 years ago

aschrijver commented 3 years ago

The README mentions:

"To me it sounded perfect for FLOSS so I wondered why the process not more widely adopted. My best guess is that people just haven't tried it."

I think I can list some reasons. The C4 Spec has a reasonable Abstract and an appealing set of Goals, but is otherwise a quite formal specification full of SHALL and MUST bullet points of which the implications aren't really clear unless one takes the time to study them thoroughly. In a similar vein the C4 Process documentation at the ZeroMQ website is a wall of text, that takes similar amount of time and attention to parse.

What is needed IMHO is a good synopsis and introductory text for noobs that can be consumed really quickly. A cheat-sheet if you will, and maybe having some process diagrams as well. In other words, some kind of article with 4-5 mins of read-time, after which one says "I really NEED this".

aschrijver commented 3 years ago

In addition to the above I'll describe my thought process when I first encountered C4, mentioned by @weex on the Open Hospitality Network matrix room:

[opens link, starts a quickscan] "Goals... MUST, SHALL, branch, patch, MPL/GPL... details, details, yada, yada, yada... Okay, interesting to revisit once I get to technical process elaboration in my planned projects." --> Bookmark-And-Forget

Or rather: Adds to a humongous pile of Very-interesting-stuff™ which I'll surely remember when the need arises :thinking: This is how things work for many people, I think. Time is precious, and everything is vying for attention.

Other than that, another reason people may skip C4 process in their project, is simply because they start on a KISS + YAGNI basis. Only when upfront you have much higher ambitions for your project, will most people deep-dive the spec.

weex commented 3 years ago

I agree this is a problem worth solving as currently we don't have good material for newcomers to quickly grok the process and the problems it solves.

weex commented 3 years ago

Made a couple of flowcharts that need a slight bit of editing but then can be dropped in a quick pitch.

(removed because they're huge)

weex commented 3 years ago

https://c4social.org/why-c4/ is now available so @aschrijver you may close this if you consider this problem solved.