Following the global gathering, I took the task to finish up a v1 of the ex “contributor guide”, now called “OFN handbook”, and the super-admin guide.
OFN handbook
The objective of this “manual” is to enable anyone interested in our project and community to learn about the project and how we are collectively organized, so they can join and play with us, or study us and get inspired for their own project. It’s the “operating manual” of the OFN community. Any contributor or potential contributor, whether it be as a dev, instance developer or sector dev content producer, can go at any moment to that guide to learn how to proceed within the community. This documents will be our “single point of truth”, and should be updated anytime we change some process, just as we update the github wiki for dev stuff.
Super-admin guide
For contributors who will specifically be instance super admin, we have built a second handbook that aims at taking the hand of new instance managers and getting step by step their setup done so they can start operating their new instance properly !
Communication plan
My proposal is:
- to link the OFN handbook from the new global site, under the “A new way of working” page.
I wrote a first text but @Jen please feel free to amend it / completely rewrite it if it’s not really in the style we want for the site, or …
A community of people
The Open Food Network is a distributed collaborative organization run by committed people all over the world. We are very inspired by sociocratic and holacratic governance systems, even though we develop our own governance model through the tensions that emerge.
Everyone can develop their own leadership within the community, and we try to organize somehow in a permacultural way, making sure for instance that every role can be done by at least 2 or 3 people, and that each person can fulfil at least 2 or 3 roles.
But to play and build together in a distributed team, we need common rules.
We have documented the way we work and are happy to share with you our OFN handbook !
A network of local affiliates
Those people cooperate globally but organize locally through local entities they create, and which collaborate with one another around the development and maintenance of shared open source resources to support the development of the local and sutainable food systems. The relationships between those local entities are formalized via a mutual agreement document : our community pledge.
The super-admin guide doesn’t have to be put on the website, it’s a technical document that should be shared to people who are in the process of setting up an instance / linked in Github for more general open source documentation.
- To link them on relevant discourse posts:
- Everything you need to know about the Open Food Network Community!
- https://community.openfoodnetwork.org/t/using-the-open-food-network-as-an-enterprise-or-a-super-admin/37
- There are some posts we might want to close/archive (lots of super-admin posts that are now in Gitbook?) but this can be done step by step
- Link them on the OFN github wiki : Home · openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork Wiki · GitHub welcome page
- Pin the super-admin guide in the channel “instance managers” and OFN handbook in the channel “global community”
Update plan
Those are just first versions, we need to improve the zapier documentation in super-admin guide, and to review a bit the priorization process in handbook. But if we think they are “good enough” (#enough) to be published already, let’s do it and then review and update whenever we change something in our process. Like Github documentation, we should all adopt the reflex to update Gitbook doc all the time ! Credentials are shared in bitwarden so it can be a shared and distributed role 
My questions now
- Are you happy with those first versions ? Else thanks for your feedbacks so I can take them into account and then publish ! If you see anything important missing, please let me know !
- Do you have comments or suggestions about the communication plan proposed ?
Of course, many people have contributed to the redaction of this document, Sally especially for the super-admin guide, and Rachel, and Lynne, and Kirsten already reviewed them, etc. Thanks you folk it’s great to work with you !
@Kirsten @lin_d_hop @Jen @Rachel @luisramos0 @sauloperez @tschumilas @lauriewayne1 @sigmundpetersen @Theodore @maikel @NickWeir @paco and everyone else
If you validate it I can do the various links apart the global website as it’s not yet published, but you can validate or amend the text I proposed 