Our project culture

Please discuss on ProjectCultureTalk.

Collaborative spirit

Encourage everyone to contribute. Avoid elitism and don't intimidate others from participating. Feel free to disagree, but please be polite in your comments.

Enable collaboration on the Foswiki project websites by leaving topics editable by everyone. (only very few topics need restricted edit access)

Take the initiative. If you see something that is broken, go ahead and fix it. Don't be afraid to improve someone else's code, documentation, or proposal, no matter who wrote it. Follow through on your ideas and suggestions, recruiting any help that is necessary. Don't wait for someone else to do it for you.

Share your ideas and plans with the community. Before making major changes, particularly ones that require considerable effort to revert, ensure you understand the current situation first. Benefit and learn from the experiences of others.

Let people know who you are and share what you have done. Don't just lurk.

Guiding principles

When it is possible and effective, strive to automate processes instead of relying on manual effort.

Focus your energy on envisioning and realizing the future, and not on dwelling on the past.

Question anything that is not clear to you. Don't be afraid to challenge supposed experts: no matter who they are, they must be able to communicate clearly with everyone.

Be willing to accept and appreciate that the ideas of others can be an improvement on your own. Avoid "Not Invented Here" syndrome or tunnel vision.

Writing style

Before creating a new page, look for an existing one into which you could integrate your planned content. However, with the goal of keeping pages short and focused, be willing to refactor the existing page as required. Summarise, rewrite, move, and delete content and topics as required. (To encourage more rewriting, the CommentPlugin has been disabled. Discuss, if that is right.) Write concisely: wordy topics take more effort to read and can be more difficult to understand.

Though administrative tidying is appreciated, such as fixing links, punctuation, and spelling, strive to make substantive changes that add information or otherwise improve the text. Don't make irrelevant edits to a topic just to get yourself in the recent changes lists. You do not need to repeat other people's remarks: you can show your support by adding new information, and refactoring as needed.

Avoid interleaved, threaded conversations in general topics, as it can dilute the focus of the page. Also avoid signing your changes to topics or otherwise overusing your signature. (Topics intended specifically to host discussion threads are exceptions.)

Use appropriate semantic markup for topic content. For example, unless a topic is primarily a list of items, it generally should not be a bulleted list.