- Created by Robert Reiner, last modified on 07. Jan 2020
Collect and maintain information relevant for your team, project, or organization collaboratively.
- Categories
The information in this space is kept up-to-date and is authoritative for the understanding of the matter. This is a heavy investment and needs a sponsor for a longer period of time. You may decide that this space should only be a collection of links with a short summary of not more than half a page. If you tend to invest more you should consider to make it publicly available. Collecting and maintaining information on a topic is a very time-intensive task.
To do domain crunching you create a new space for this information. Use topics to add information for each interesting subject. A topic may be subdivided into additional topics or sections. To group topics in different aspects use tours. Each tour is targeting to answer a specific question and assembles the topics in a sequence to serve this purpose (often with a specific audience in mind).
In order to organize the information in your topic space define categories, tags, subject, and topic types.
You may also consider to create glossary in this space (or a separate space) to clarify terms of your domain.
Related Space Types
- If you are just interested to work on a subject for a short period of time, you may decide to create a journal (especially a spike journal) instead. At a later point in time the gathered information may be stored to a topic space. This approach frees the investigating team members to arrange the gathered information in their final structure and allows the topic space team to organize the space by the lessons learned.
- If you need to collect and annotate external resources, check if creating a library is suiting your requirements better.
Resources
Information Material
The following list of resources provides background information on creating and working with topic spaces based on the projectdoc Toolbox for Confluence..
| Resource | Short Description | Type |
|---|---|---|
Get started with the projectdoc Toolbox: learning by doing | topic | |
Concepts central to projectdoc. Things users have to understand to get the most out of using projectdoc. | topic | |
Create a library for your project. Reference books, podcasts, videos, and other resources that provide information on the topics relevant for your project. | business-use-case | |
To work with a domain everybody needs to use the terms unerringly. Create a glossary to create a common understanding of your domains. | business-use-case | |
| Finding without Searching | How to organize a wiki to increase the findability of information. | Blog Article |
| Finding without Searching - applied! | How to use the projectdoc Toolbox to organize information in a Confluence wiki. | Blog Article |
Get users started with collecting external information that is relevant for their project. Each piece of information is referenced by a resource document. Excerpts and quotes are used to catch detailed information and make it referenceable. | tour |
Doctypes
The following doctypes (blueprints based on the projectdoc Toolbox) provided page blueprints to create a topic space.
| Resource | Short Description | Categories |
|---|---|---|
Guided tours through existing information. This allows to aggregate topics for a given question or audience, thus providing a view on a topic. | ||
A description of a given topic. A topic may describing or explaining a concept, a task to accomplish or a reference. There are a couple of topic types that set the expectations for the reader. Instances of the topic doctype usually have independent lifetimes from any referencing documents. | ||
Sections of a document are typically part of a document. But the size of sections may vary. To support a team to write collaboratively on the documentation, a larger document may be subdivided into external section documents. | ||
A topic type is a semantic type of the topic. It helps to set the expectations of potential readers. | ||
Resources are books, webpages, videocasts relevant for the project. Add important information to your project about resources that lie outside the control of your team. | ||
Categories allow to set document instance of different doctypes in a hierarchy. | ||
Document the semantics of a tag. May also be used to document Confluence labels. | ||
Defines a role with its responsibilities, tasks and requirements. Roles are incorporated by stakeholders who take interest in the project. The are also used to define the audience for documents. | ||
Describes an information need and use this description as a basis to create and maintain a document. |
Macros
The following macros of the projectdoc Toolbox support creating or working with a topic space.
| Resource | Short Description | Categories |
|---|---|---|
Lists references to projectdoc documents in a table. Allows to select document properties for columns. Also non-list representations are provided. | ||
Lists references to projectdoc documents in a list. List contain names and optional short descriptions. | ||
Renders a predefined list of documents in a table. | ||
Lists references to projectdoc documents. The rendering will add a link to a document, if there is a document with the given name. | ||
Renders a template with property references. | ||
Renders document history information. |
