Thank you for this post @alisher , this is a very important topic and it dovetails perfectly into the subjects we’ve been discussing over the past few months. I’m really happy to see you open this conversation to a public post, thank you.
You make a number of point that I agree with very strongly.
Our Processes
I believe that product briefs should also be public, or at very least a subset of product briefs. We need to make clear publicly what the process for going from feature request to implementation is. Which ties nicely into your point of “Decision-making and culture → visible”. As a community member I’d want to know how does an idea go from my feature request to being in the app.
As you know I performed some research on this subject in an attempt to gather an understanding of what each team within Status find important, please see the here: Status App - Feature Lifecycle and here Feature Lifecycle - Status Teams Feedback Analysis.
One of the key outcomes was identifying a common need for a “Requirements Document”. In your view, is the Feature Context Doc a precursor to that, or a replacement, or another distinct layer of shared understanding, or even a sub-set / super-set of that?
The Struggle for an Open Wiki
The question of where our wiki should live I feel is not resolved. Notion is good for user convenience however it is proprietary and closed source, we have no control over what Notion decides to do with our data or what access Notion will allow us to have in the future. I do not like Notion particularly for our public facing engagement.
I’m still very much in support of a WikiMedia Wiki like Logos has, and this was my main push in the below post.
And as a compromise I created this github based wiki Status App - Wiki. But I don’t think that a Github wiki is a very featureful one, there are too many features not available in a Github wiki, it is basically loosely knitted markdown files with a git version control. And it doesn’t have inline comments!
“open wiki with inline comments”
I hear this, this is something I’ve been working on.
I’ve been experimenting with MediaWiki’s InlineComments extension with a local installation of a template wiki as a possible path forward. This plug in is very featureful and it combines what we want from an OS wiki with the collaborative features we’re used to from tools like Notion. See the video below from the wiki extension page:
Outro
I’d love to explore how your Feature Context Doc format, Feature Requirements Document, our ADR template, and the idea of a shared wiki might come together into a coherent documentation ecosystem. Something lightweight but expressive, where decisions, motivations, requirements, and implementation context are all visible, traceable, and remixable.
Thanks again for kicking this off in public. Looking forward to seeing where it goes and being part of it.