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Welcome to our handbook

Welcome to Common Guide, this is our organisational handbook.

If you're looking for introductory information about us, please go here.

This handbook is a bit different

Firstly this handbook is open, open to read and use, open to contribute to, edit and remix and even use elsewhere. Secondly this openness is already bringing benefits, the handbook itself is derived from a collaborative multi-organisation project known as the Common Guide.

Fast evolving standard policies are improved and developed by a whole collection of different organisations. In exchange for slightly less customisation we benefit from up-to-date policies and where we have an issue we can join in on the development. Organisationally if we ever have a serious concern with any of these policies we can always approve our own, but this practice helps us avoid a bunch of busy work and focus on those things we care about most. The handbook is also hosted in plain text files and is available to download and contribute to. This makes the contents in this handbook highly future proof and not dependent on corporate interests. Can you think of a place where you’ve invested time into making content online, but it's all locked up and hard to get to? We don’t want that for how we run.

Structure

There are two main types of document within this guide, common documents we develop with other organisations, special documents are more unique to our particular needs, but are still there to share with other organisations. The book is broken up into chapters and sub-chapters. The chapters are:

  • Agreements are the official legislation that governs how we operate. Changing these requires a formal process.
  • Guides explain in practical terms how we do stuff.
  • Working Groups are where we do work on the organisation.

About This Handbook

This Handbook's primary audience is for those most involved in running our organisation, but it will be publicly available for others who might find it useful. The goal is to give everyone within our organisation and our surrounding network as much clarity and context as possible, while sharing our structures and practices with the outside world as well. This handbook is in perpetual beta, it's constantly changing. If you see something that could be improved: that's your invitation to improve it!

Interested to know more?

We encourage you to look around, ask questions and even suggest edits to this handbook. We appreciate your interest in our work. Get involved (or in touch) if you aren’t already.