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rationale & scope

Rationale

Test the hypothesis: can better documentation address some of the challenges that we’ve face with fully-distributed working?

Scope

The handbook is narrow in scope and deep detail. abstracting for current work and projects this should contain sufficient information to answer a hypothetical new-joiner’s question:

during my first week here, what do I need to know to be at the right place at the right time?

nothing more

principles & structure

  • editable by all
  • the team’s meta-knowledge in one place
  • an informal, structured, accurate snapshot of our methodologies, workflows, and current meeting cadence
  • a known, single-source of a narrowly defined set of atemporal (i.e. not project-specific) how we operate
  • the changelog and release notes summarises changes in our ways of working - i.e. everything we’ve learnt and struggled with working in a distributed manner, our iterative approach to overcoming them, and how that’s informed our vision of the future of work

structure

  • The Changelog highlights a snapshot of our current working cadence.
  • Each change is linked to a PR or Issue - this creates a traceable flow of issue / problem -> change implemented to address that problem e.g. Slack is not asynchronous

What this is not

  • a knowledge-base for everything we’ve done
  • information on anything beyond core team admin

First steps

as a new joiner, you should:

  • Get access to the xLab Slack (@kp)
  • Get access to the xLab Tandem (@os)
  • Get access to Jira & Confluence (@kp)
  • Get access to Miro (@yc)
  • Get access to Github (click the workflow button on the #dd-tools-admin channel)
  • Subscribe to the shared Calendar (@os)

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