Help us write the next IT culture book

Find out how you can contribute to the next volume in the Open Organization series.
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Opensource.com

If open organizations should be flexible, inclusive, collaborative, and communal, then so should the books we write about them.

So as the open organization community at Opensource.com prepares its next volume in the Open Organization book series, it's working the open source way.

This addition to the series will be chock full of writing at the intersection of organizational culture, open organizational models, and the agility-focused management paradigms becoming more popular in IT shops around the world. It'll put open-minded practitioners in conversation with devotees of scrum, continuous integration, DevOps, and kanban. It'll demonstrate the value of a culture-first approach to creating innovative teams.

And it may very well be the first book developed according to the Open Decision Framework.

That means it's open and ready for your suggestions, additions, and revisions. Just peruse the project on GitHub or join our community mailing list to participate.

You can contribute to this project by:

  • Reviewing the book's table of contents and pitching a contribution
  • Pointing potential authors to this project
  • Addressing an outstanding issue we've flagged
  • Reviewing page proofs in this repository and recording errors
  • Reviewing page proofs in this repository and developing end-of-chapter discussion questions and summary statements
  • Suggesting a title for the book

We're pushing updates regularly as the book takes shape. Our community hopes you'll join us as we re-imagine the future of IT—in the open, of course.

Bryan Behrenshausen
Bryan formerly managed the Open Organization section of Opensource.com, which features stories about the ways open values and principles are changing how we think about organizational culture and design. He's worked on Opensource.com since 2011. Find him online as semioticrobotic.

5 Comments

When is the closing time for possible contributions? We have discussed an idea previously but it's not ready in any written form yet.

Glad you found it, Jimmy! And doubly glad that we could connect via email. Looking forward to working with you, as always.

I'm definitely on board with writing & wrangling here; -ENOTIME is always a problem, but this topic is includes the idea of open infrastructure where you follow the same guidelines as the source code side of a project. Overall this new book sounds like a great convergence of my past work on theopensourceway.org & current work on open infrastructure for Red Hat sponsored projects and as part of the upstream at opensourceinfra.org with folks such as @pleia2 (who recently wrote this article for opensource.com - https://opensource.com/article/17/3/growth-open-source-project-infrastr… .)

Looked through the Git repo & related materials, I'm a bit confused about timeline and process. At this point, is there still room for pitching new content? I'm thinking of various points to make about how open source projects are leading the way with doing infrastructure the open source way; we've got quite a large number of examples at http://www.opensourceinfra.org/ . Just as open source creates and leads the curve on the software side, open infrastructure incorporates and leads the way forward for the type of material and topics in this new IT culture book.

(I've just joined the mailing list so now I can peruse the closed archives; it appears on the face of it that you had things pretty much defined by the time of the open announcement, so I'm wondering if there is still room for more authors, more chapter ideas, or even a new section if what I'm proposing warrants it?)

In reply to by quaid

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