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• Spreadsheet of existing confluence spaces (and markup)

Context

Engineering themes/squads/teams currently organize themselves on the wiki in a lot of different ways which makes it difficult to discover information about other squads and hinders cross team communication and collaboration.

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• Confluence’s own page on how to write better documentation

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Organizational Proposals

Confluence is currently hard to navigate. There are relatively few spaces, each with a lot of grief of not being able to find anything in Confluence, how can we improve our docs and organization to make docs less of a dirty word?

… documentation comes in all shapes and sizes, internal and external. Different types of docs require different voice, tone, formatting, contributors, audience, and content.

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nested, out of date, or abandoned information that doesn’t have a clear information hierarchy. How can we improve this?

High-level proposals include:

• Creating spaces spaces that mirror organizational structure. These exist separately from functional spaces (e.g. Engineering), which are largely disconnected with organization structure.

• Establish well-known directories, like the edX or Theme spaces which link out to team/project spaces.

• Embracing linking to improve discoverability and reduce duplication.

• Appointing space owners and empowering them to organize, upkeep, and archive docs within their spaces.

Spaces

What does this look like in practice?

1. The edX space operates as the highest level directory and has a directory that links to departments and theme spaces for discoverability, themes, and company-wide resources (like work-from-home guidance).

2. Departments & Functions - Departments and functions each get their own space . They contain (this is already largely in place). These spaces contain reference docs that are helpful across team/theme/org boundaries (e.g. Brand, UX, HR, Data Engineering) like reference, end-user docs, and projects scoped to the department (e.g. brand guidelines, HR reference, architecture docs). Note that some of these spaces (e.g. Brand, Architecture & Engineering) should inherently be public, while others (e.g. HR, IT, Eng-Engineering (internal)) should be internal only. Spaces should clearly identify the audience , in the space title or landing page and have access rights set accordingly.

3. Themes - Themes also each get their own space, linked from the edX space for visibility. They are a cross-functional organization of resources around a theme (e.g. Content, Engagement).

4. Themes should link to the teams on a theme for discoverability.

Projects may also be created as pages on a theme level for cross-team (but theme-internal) projects

Themes further act as directories for teams and projects within their scope.

5. Teams - Teams get their own spaces for internal documentation and collaboration. Internally they may do what they please but should be linked from the owning theme and have some basic external-facing info (see further down the page in Teams to see what should be in a team space).

6. Projects - Projects of sufficient complexity should be entered into Confluence, establishing a landing page for schedules/docs/decisions. They may either get their own spaces or be a page/folder under a specific Team/Theme, whichever is the appropriate owner or provides appropriate access rightsthat cross team/theme boundaries should get their own space or page in Confluence (depending on scoping) as a way of organizing resources across the org. These should be used as a directory for schedules, docs, and decisions as well as listing the final decision maker to reduce ambiguity on a project.

7. Working Groups - Groups or initiatives that don’t have clear functional or theme owners (e.g. Security Working Group, DEI, Hackathon). Like projects, they may chose to create their own spaces or exist as a page tree under an appropriate owner (probably edX, except for function-specific groups like Security Working Group).

Rationale -

• Having a highest-level space act as a directory makes other parts of the org discoverable. Structuring our docs like we structure our organization helps enforce mental models that make traversing the docs (and org) easier.

• Establishing well-known “directory spaces” (edX, themes) makes it easier to find and navigate spaces within the org.

• Continuing to use department/function spaces allows functional docs (e.g. engineering, HR) to be broadly accessible across the org and to control internal/external access.

• Docs and access rights are most commonly scoped to a space. Allowing for the creation of more spaces allows individual teams/projects/themes to internally organize in the best way for them.

• Use of linking allows for discovery of disconnected spaces.

• Providing “external” info on each project/team allows for outside project/team members to understand how to interact with or contact the project/team.

What happens when Org/Team/Project structure changes?

TL;DR - doc/space owners are responsible for updating to reflect changes.

See Documentation Strategy for further notes/guidance.

Sample Doc Hierarchy

Example map. Highest-level bullets are spaces. Sub bullets are pages/folders. Elements in brackets are placeholders for actual themes/teams/projects.

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Rationale - Particularly with lots of team/org changes, tracking who is where, who owns what, and how to contact them have been repeated refrains. By clearly indicating who is on teams, what the team used to be called, and how to contact, we remove having to have a mental model of how the org has evolved.

Projects

Project pages/spaces are for centralizing information about a project while it is in progress. They should be viewed as the source of truth for decisions/docs surrounding a project or feature.

Projects should exist a the lowest level of access to still be accessed by all stakeholders (a project for a team may exist in a team’s project folder, but a project with multiple on-theme teams should exist at the theme project level).

Project main directory for project discovery, planning, and working docs. Note: Technical decisions, when finalized, should still move to GitHub as noted in our Documentation Strategy.

Projects may be their own space, or exist as a pages under a team/theme, depending on what is the most useful for organizing resources. Regardless, project pages should answer the following:

1. Problem definition/summary - What is the project trying to accomplish?

2. Status - Where in the project lifecycle is this project (e.g. planning, implementation, delivered, abandoned)?

3. Membership - :

   1. Who (individuals or teams) is working on the project

   and who

   1. ?

   2. Who has the final say on project decisions?

4. Doc links - Relevant links to Jira epics/features, design/discovery docs, planning notes, etc. This is where canonical info lives and should be seen as source of truth.

Changing locations

Projects can change team/squad/theme. When they do, the docs should change location to be under the new owner’s space to give them access ownership and ability to move forward the docs.

Projects that do change locations should note (in the status or membership) the trail of moved teams for traceability.

Rationale - A consistent issue with collaboration/communication is having a clear, centralized location for docs and decisions. Teams are small enough where they might be able to keep it all “in their heads” but, for cross-team projects, we need better ways of organizing multiple minds. This removes the difficulty with discovering different docs and worrying whether they’re out of date. Identifying the key decision maker also removes the ambiguity of wondering who has the final say on a design decision.

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