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Adding the COMMUNICATION.md to the Standard Base Documentation pattern #589

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merged 10 commits into from
Sep 14, 2023
34 changes: 28 additions & 6 deletions patterns/2-structured/project-setup/base-documentation.md
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New contributors to an InnerSource project have a hard time figuring out who
maintains the project, what to work on, and how to contribute. Providing
documentation in standard files like `README.md`/`CONTRIBUTING.md` enables a
documentation in standard files like `README.md`/`CONTRIBUTING.md`/`COMMUNICATION.md` enables a
self service process for new contributors, so that they can find the answers to
the most common questions on their own.

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![CONTRIBUTING.md](../../../assets/img/standard-base-documentation/CONTRIBUTING-for-contributors.png)

### COMMUNICATION.md

Create a separate `COMMUNICATION.md` document. Link this document to your README.md so comprehensive contact information can be provided and not take up the extra space in your README. This document should answer frequently
asked questions about communicating with your team that contributors need to know. The goal is to streamline communications so users and contributors reach out to the correct person through a single channel. This reduces unnecessary distractions for team members and organizes communications so they do not get lost.

These communications can be broken into incoming and outgoing communications. Sections in the COMMUNICATION.md include:
Points of contact for incoming communication and how to contact those users. Some examples include:
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* Reporting a bug
* Following up on a PR
* Feature requests
* Questions about documentation
* Escalations

How and when the team communicates outbound with users and how to get added to those communications. Some examples include where/how to get communications about:

* Planned and unplanned outages
* Feature releases
* Code freezes
* Breaking changes

There are many of good examples for how to write a `README.md` and what kind
of information to include in a `CONTRIBUTING.md` file in various open source projects.
Pages like [how to write a readme that rocks](https://m.dotdev.co/how-to-write-a-readme-that-rocks-bc29f279611a),
[Open Source Guide from GitHub](https://opensource.guide/) as well as
the book [Producing Open Source](https://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.html)
all have valuable information on what kind of information to provide. While
Producing Open Source does not have a chapter on writing a good README per se,
the [Getting Started
chapter](https://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.html#starting-from-what-you-have)
the [Getting Started chapter](https://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.html#starting-from-what-you-have)
does provide a fairly extensive list of things that fellow host team members,
users and contributors will need. InnerSource projects likely will not cover all
of those aspects right from the start, the list itself is helpful for
inspiration for what one could cover.

In addition to that, this pattern comes with two very basic templates to get you
started right away: [README-template.md](templates/README-template.md) and
[CONTRIBUTING-template.md](templates/CONTRIBUTING-template.md)
In addition to that, this pattern comes with three very basic templates to get you
started right away: [README-template.md](templates/README-template.md),
[CONTRIBUTING-template.md](templates/CONTRIBUTING-template.md), and [COMMUNICATION-template.md](templates/COMMUNICATION-template.md).

## Resulting Context

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* Europace AG - See blog post [InnerSource: Adding base documentation](https://tech.europace.de/post/innersource-base-documentation/)
* Paypal Inc.
* Mercado Libre - create a documentation site that contains how to get started with InnerSource and also define the basic artifacts that a repository must have to be InnerSource (README, CONTRIBUTING, CODING_GUIDELINES, etc).
* Analog Devices Inc.

## Authors

* Isabel Drost-Fromm
* Katie Schueths

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## Alias

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