Organisation

These pages describe our organisation design, specifically focusing on how we collaborate and structure our work.

Values

Any human creation is influenced by our values and perspectives of the world around us. We can let these values guide us in our work on Seedcase Project unconsciously and implicitly, without examining, critiquing, and evaluating them, or we can explicitly and consciously select, describe, and explain the values we want to be guided by.

We want to be explicit and conscious about what, how, and importantly, why we are doing what we decide to do. Being explicit will also help focus our work and (hopefully) make us more efficient and effective.

• How we work is as important as what we make or do.

• Work that is visible and open is easier to participate in, engage with, and contribute to.

• Openness and transparency lead to better collaboration and products.

• Being explicit is better than being implicit.

• Prescriptive methods are easier to use than descriptive ones¹.

• Small consistent improvements are more impactful over time than big irregular ones.

• Human interactions and emotions are as important as products and outputs.

• Investing in the future will give better outcomes than thinking short-term.

• Building expertise is as important as building products.

• Deeply understanding the problem, the domain, and the code produces better, more reliable, and more maintainable products.

Principles

We have a set of principles influenced by our values for different aspects of our work, like teams, collaboration, and contributions. For all of them, we have these two general principles:

• Use established standards and practices where possible and as appropriate.

• Be flexible and open to modern, newer tools or processes, even when they aren’t widely used, as long as there is a strong rationale for it.

• Have dedicated learning and development time that is separate and protected from project work so we keep developing our expertise just as much as the software.

Design patterns

Design patterns are common solutions to problems. We use these patterns to organise ourselves and our work:

• All content is put into GitHub repositories, the default being public rather than private.

• One GitHub repository corresponds to one product that is located at the root of the repository.

• A “project” is working towards a major point of progress for a product, like a first prototype.

• Each team works on only one project at a time and each project is only on one board (e.g., the Product or Platform board). If someone has a task on the project board, they are on the team. working on that project.

Footnotes

1. An example of a prescriptive approach would be giving a template folder structure that one uses and follows while a descriptive approach would be describing how to create a folder structure for a project with possibles names for files.