Confluence Governance Process

[DPA]

Hello

We are rolling out Confluence within our organization. I want to understand if there is any Governance process we should implement(like Tag format, linking document across spaces(not keeping 5 copies in 5 different spaces)) etc .

Thanks

DP

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Most of your "governance" should be driven by you and your users.

As a general rule, form a stakeholder group and have them decide on the guidelines for usage.  They should be people who will be making the most use of Confluence, and be representative of all your users.  Have a Jira project (or at least some way) to record requests for change so the group can choose whether the changes are right (and handle support calls and new space creations if you're limiting that to admins only, and so-on)

To answer your examples and add a hint:

• "linking, not keeping 5 copies" should probably be done with "one page as the source, using the include macro on the other 4 places the content is wanted"
• Tags need to be useful to the users, so I would generally not try to create a rigid format.  Try to agree on some guidelines - always use a specific character to separate words (not mix +_-. etc, and never never spaces - they do not work), and agree on one spelling standard for common languages.  If, for example, you are labelling in English, decide if you're going to use English (colour) or American English (color).
• Related to label rules - get someone who is willing to curate content.  Give them a page which shows them recent new labels and maybe a label "cloud" so they can go in and change ones that don't fit or are single-use.  Ideally, give them reports on labels that are barely used.  Show them the "recent content" so they can see what people are up to, but also think about how to curate old pages that may need updates or even removing.

[Emily Errico]

I'd add: the most important thing is enforcing consistency. Our Confluence didn't start out with a consistent governance process, so there's a lot of great information that isn't readily available to the people who are looking for it. From experience, I can say it is a giant pain to switch from one governance process to another or try and merge several governance processes.

Also, make sure that your governance process, whatever you choose, is intuitive to your users. If it makes more sense to them to have the author of a page add as many labels as they can think of with one assigned gardner to clean up after them, then do that.

I ultimately agree with @Nic Brough -Adaptavist-, ask the people who are using Confluence the most for their input before implementing any governance process.