Git
Git is a version control system designed to help you manage a collection of documents. It helps you publish the documents' current version as well as track the changes over time.
Why We Love Git
- It is commonly used and well documented.
- It is open source.
- It is easily accessible from anywhere in the world.
- Its accessibility is secure and well vetted.
- It has a vibrant online support community.
- It makes the instructions we need to do our jobs immediately available.
- It can be deployed in every corner of the world.
- It can be deployed in hybrid cloud scenarios.
- It is CLI first to help support AI and automation.
- It offers a reasonably simple architecture given the nature of its purpose.
- It scales massively for small to medium organizations.
- It does its job (work instructions) quite well.
- And, most importantly it has great synergy with the rest of the chuck-stack.
Git Service Providers
To get the most from Git, you will use one of the following service providers:
- Github - one of the most popular and feature rich Git providers
- GitLab - a popular alternative to Github that allows for self-hosting
- Gitea - an emerging solution for self-hosting Git.
More Than Git
These providers deliver more than just Git repository management. They provide the services a team needs to collaborate and develop a solution. These services include:
- Ticket management
- Discussions (Github - only)
- Commit (change) management
- Pull Requests (review and change workflows)
- Documentation management and presentation
The Git style PR (pull request review and change workflow) can be intimidating to users who are not familiar with the process or the terminology. Please keep an open mind when learning PR because it is extremely valuable, and we believe it will play a pivotal role in how we execute best practices.
The Story Behind Improvement
Organizations constantly evolve to meet the demands of a changing society. There are assumptions, beliefs, experiments, successes and failures along this journey. Why we chose a particular option or path and how we implement it can be just as important as the choice itself. We want to not only document the current mission, vision, values, goals, objectives and instructions but we also want to document how and why these 'things' came to exist.
Institutional knowledge is the result of knowing both the past and the current. Let's map the above services to into how we create institutional knowledge:
- Ticket - is a call to action. Something happened (corrective) that needs to be addressed, or something might happen (preventative) that needs to be considered. Tickets support the change management process by describing why and how of an action.
- Discussions - happen as a result of a thought or a concern. These discussions can happen inside a dedicated space for ad-hoc discussions, or they can happen inside a ticket, or they can happen in both places.
- Commit - is the tool/action to change to what is current into something new. Said another way, commits archive the exiting and create a new current version. Many organizations adopt a policy that commits only occur in the scope of a ticket. Said another way, no ticket - no change. This policy make sense some times (not always).
- Documentation - is often tracked alongside other instructions. Github, for example, offers a service called Github Pages where you can host documentation without needed a separate server.
AI and Institutional Knowledge
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