Curating Confluence - Day 2

[#1]

Curation Confluence - Governance

A well-curated Confluence site starts with an approach to governance. As I stated yesterday, “Curating a well-organized Confluence site requires thoughtful planning, consistent maintenance, and strategic use of built-in features.” Governance describes how decisions are made about curating your Confluence site. In subsequent posts, I will discuss a range of options and decisions that a governance body may want to make to keep your Confluence site humming along. Today, I want to focus on the importance of having a process for making those decisions.

Forms of Governance

There are several approaches to governance. You and your organization will need to choose the approach that best meets your needs and your culture. The two most prevalent approaches are to have a designated curator(s) and to establish a Center of Excellence. Less successful is to allow individual space administrators carte blanche to manage their own spaces, which I will discuss at the end of this post.

• Designated Curator: In some organizations, the best choice is to have an individual or group of people designated as the curator. The number of people that you designate will depend on the size of your organization and the uptake of Confluence as the organizational repository for information. Smaller organizations may create a job title specifically for Confluence curation and hire someone to fill this role. In my experience, the ideal person for this dedicated role is a technical writer. Technical writers understand the intricacies of quality communication and how to translate from jargon-filled documents written by engineers that often gloss over key information that the original authors incorrectly assumed was common knowledge. In especially large organizations that need multiple curators, this may be a team that is empowered to make and enforce the key curation decisions.
• Confluence Center of Excellence: In smaller organizations, where only a single curator, full or part-time, is needed, they are often well served by leading or facilitating a Center of Excellence (CoE). A CoE can be comprised of volunteers who express a special interest in the quality of the Confluence site, or it can be a designated group representing the various interested and affected teams across the organization. In either case, the CoE is ultimately responsible for the quality of the site.

In either case, whether curation is invested in a single person, a team of curators, or a Center of Excellence, the Curator is responsible for setting the standards for Confluence use, responding to requests for changes or additions to the standards, communicating the standards, auditing compliance to standards, providing training and guidance to Confluence users and creating and collecting metrics that will lead to continuous improvement of the Confluence site.

Avoid this trap

One of the mistakes that I see customers making with respect to Confluence is to allow too much local autonomy to individual space admins. If you are new to Confluence, then it is useful to know that a Confluence site is comprised of Spaces and that each Space holds pages of various types. Each space has one or more individuals who are designated as space administrators. With a space, the administrator can restrict or provide access to the space, they can create and promote space-specific templates, they can use advanced features such as CSS styles to influence the look-and-feel of the Confluence space. Generally, space admins control many of the features of a space.

The problem that arises when space admins are given autonomy to customize their space as suits the specific needs of their team or space users is that the overall Confluence site becomes a series of disconnected spaces, each appearing to exist on its own without relating to the other spaces across the site. This negates one of the great powers of Confluence, which is to allow bringing information together from across the organization, regardless of which team may have created it. For example, it is possible to create a page the collects all of the how-to articles that have been created in the many different knowledge domains. If these pages all use different templates or have different labels, then the task of creating this global how-to directory becomes impossible.

In the articles that follow, I will describe different techniques and tips that illustrate best-practices in curating your Confluence site. While these can be used by individual space admins and even individual users, I encourage you to start by defining and adopting a site-wide governance approach. Not only will this streamline the decision-making process, it will demonstrate your organization’s commitment to a quality Confluence site.

[Amelia Giuliani]

As someone who champions Confluence in a smaller organization, I'm not sure I agree with the problems of team autonomy. While, yes, it is hard to curate giant lists of articles across spaces, I don't understand the need for the lists. Atlassian's search bar in Confluence is extremely powerful. And most spaces are dedicated to a specific team - holding their team information, how to reach them, current projects, meeting notes, and process documentation. Why would I want to list out all the how to process documents across the org? Why do they need to be formatted the same if it doesn't serve the team? I can't imagine a troubleshooting document in IT vs. Customer Service would need the same types of information and I don't understand a situation where I would need to house a list of all of them together. 
We do have some shared spaces focused on our company as a whole or our software solutions that do follow the same template structures to keep information together and are lead by our technical writer and some general company information lead by HR/people teams but the space is what groups those items together - no need for large additional initiatives to put specific tags in use across spaces or owners. 
Does anyone have some good use cases for when having uniform templates/article tags across spaces is helpful? I want to make sure I'm creating a scalable knowledge base and it might be that I am missing something because I'm in a smaller organization. 

[Todor Velikov]

@Amelia Giuliani
From personal experience having a uniform set of practices across all spaces within a site would allow users to use the knowledge base more efficiently, if each space has its own set of rules of how to link/display and nest content then every time a user opens a new space they'll have to re-learn the way that team handles content.
Another thing that comes to mind as a consequence is the countless times when we have created duplicated content across different spaces.

I do agree that team autonomy per space should exist especially for internal content, but a set of rules on org level for labels, restrictions, use of macros, space home page layouts etc. should be set.

[Derek Fields _RightStar_]

@Amelia Giuliani - There is no one right answer that works for every organization. However, the larger the organization gets, the more standardization is going to be important. My go-to example of best-in-class documentation is Atlassian's own Confluence space. Not every page is up to their high quality, but they are laid out uniformly, I know what to expect and how to scan their pages for the information that I want.

[Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps]

In some organizations, the best choice is to have an individual or group of people designated as the curator.

Herding cats. I agree need someone manage content. A periodic light clean up can go a long way to keeping pages reasonably up to date (perfection is not the goal). Most importantly limit glaring errors that cause cascading problems.

I've been that person, work that doesn't get much respect. I co-built this app, Space Content Manager, that's on the Atlassian Marketplace to deal with bulk content editing.

The bulk find and replace feature is one of those things we built that I was like wow I would love to have that. A name of something changes and now can update it without mistakes in a couple of minutes. I use it to check for mistakes as well, Confluence written lowercase confluence annoys me and for public pages such mistakes add up to something that does not look professional.

[Jay Maechtlen]

Training? What a concept!

I think most of our groups have their own spaces, and I suspect that some straddle more than one space.

We do not have any policy of cleanup or deprecation of pages. That could be well worthwhile.

Thanks for the article, I will be interested to learn more.