Clarify relationship to principles articulated at Opensource.com

[semioticrobotic]

Opensource.com explains the open source way as a set of five interlocking principles:

• Transparency
• Collaboration
• Release early and often
• Meritocracy
• Community

Is clarifying this guidebook's relationship to that definitional set of principles appropriate or desirable? And if so, then what role should those principles play in the guide's unifying narrative and/or organizational schema?

[quaid]

Oh now this is interesting to talk about, do let's!

Those principles have always struck me as a reduction of a distillate--capturing a lot of ideas underneath simpler language. I haven't seen a mapping of these five higher-level principles to the more detailed principles as we cover them in The Open Source Way, but I presume it all would work. Let's put a pin in that map for a moment.

It would be a good exercise to capture in this discussion here any source material that shows how those five principles were derived. Note cards from a design thinking session, rough mapping, anything that presents the journey of how those came about. This would help us here in being able to adopt those in some way as guiding principles with knowledge and insight.

They don't seem to align in terms of organizational schema, because this is a guide to tell people how to do things. This is where the current structure comes from, and I'd think we want to revise it further in the direction of more visible guiding processes within the "why" material that that we think is a hallmark of this guide. That is, be sure we're clear enough with the how-to in the structure for all the different types of learners/readers, while putting our opinion-stamp on the why.

Back to the pin in a map, I'm wondering if we can use those principles as categories for each content section. "This section in an example of the principles of Transparency and Collaboration." Then authors and editors--using guidelines--put sections in one or more categories, and actually keep that in mind when writing/editing the body of the content. Once it's clear a section is going to cover e.g. Community, then make sure the polish helps that principle shine in the writing.

These are just my initial thoughts here, I'm curious what @shaunix & @bproffitt think.

[semioticrobotic]

It would be a good exercise to capture in this discussion here any source material that shows how those five principles were derived. Note cards from a design thinking session, rough mapping, anything that presents the journey of how those came about. This would help us here in being able to adopt those in some way as guiding principles with knowledge and insight.

I was part of a recent working group that updated and refreshed the principles for a new edition of The Book of Red Hat. That revision used the preceding version as inspiration—and I'd always assumed (likely incorrectly, I now see!) that version derived from The Open Source Way.

So I think we're full-on ouroboros now.

Unfortunately I don't know if I can offer much in the way of process artifacts that might document the effort, but I will think on it.

Back to the pin in a map, I'm wondering if we can use those principles as categories for each content section. "This section in an example of the principles of Transparency and Collaboration." Then authors and editors--using guidelines--put sections in one or more categories, and actually keep that in mind when writing/editing the body of the content. Once it's clear a section is going to cover e.g. Community, then make sure the polish helps that principle shine in the writing.

I was thinking along similar lines. I'd also considered using the principles as organizing concepts for the practices of community-development and management the guide would elaborate—similar to the way the open organization community organized The Open Organization Workbook. Another way to slice the pie.

[quaid]

I was part of a recent working group that updated and refreshed the principles for a new edition of The Book of Red Hat. That revision used the preceding version as inspiration—and I'd always assumed (likely incorrectly, I now see!) that version derived from The Open Source Way.

So I think we're full-on ouroboros now.

Unfortunately I don't know if I can offer much in the way of process artifacts that might document the effort, but I will think on it.

What I think happened is, way back originally opensource.com and theopensourceway.org were being created in parallel from tribal knowledge, with open conversations and cross-seeding. I admit to not holding the highest confidence that list is the best possible list. For example, there have since been a lot of reasonable discussions and objections around the ideas and implementation of Meritocracy. It's possible something is missing from the list.

Maybe a different approach from looking backward is to look forward within the work as it happens. If we have some guidelines for how to tie content into the five principles, we'll all keep our eyes open for the arising of additional principles, or changes in what is there. (Regardless of how we organize, we'd be constantly aware of those overarching principles and thus more likely to notice gaps.)