Workflow

This page describes a concept which is part of our glossary

Wiki workflow summary

Workflow

A wiki-based organisation must operate upon a formal workflow system which allows us to define goals in terms of available roles and processes and monitor their progress and productivity. Also this will mean that all our threads of operations are already "packaged up" for out-sourcing to our established contacts or to other organisations like elance or rentacoder.

The workflow system should be implemented with both the semantic organisation and the nodal model in mind. I think the simplest way to ensure a smooth transition into our P2P vision (web4) is to begin modelling the workflow using the methods and tools we currently use - namely templates. The workflow special page can assist in using templates for a workflow system by rendering a tree interface to the workflow hierarchy. The nodal aspect is that the template hierarchy describes a multiplexed view of the workload which can therefore be processed nodally.

Another important aspect of the workflow system is to track the time spent on each job by the various roles, and to maintain assessments of their productivity (by gaining statistics on the completion time of various job classes). All this information can be maintained by defining and scheduling reports (similar to how we'd implement Selenium for interface testing). Reports and tests are just processes which run regularly storing the result in a particular article dedicated to that test). The "report" namespace would probably be appropriate since they'd contained a specific class of information.

Instantiation

Instantiation of workflow items is an important concept which should work more similarly to make install than to standard object instantiation. Furthermore these instantiated structures should be maintained over time on an appropriate communications schedule with the class or package source. Instantiation starts by creating a new workflow article exhibiting an appropriate template call and parameters. The new workflow is hooked into the overall reducing workflow structure in the appropriate context - eg. a scheduled task, or to be processed by a particular function/service, or perhaps in a Human role's workflow "inbox".

See also

• Workflow extension on MediaWiki
• Open-source business
• Wikipedia:Workflow
• Wikipedia's current wiki-workflow categories
• Wikipedia's article on categoriation
• Wikipedia administration
• [[1]]
• The state of workflow - by Tom Baeyens
• Cloud storage in a post-SQL world
• P2P:Peer Governance
• EarthOS
• Self-aware e-society
• Introduction to Ontology - Barry Smith
  • Barry Smith is behind the Basic Formal Ontology and is heavily influenced by Husserl (particularly Husserl's Logical Investigations)
• Open-source business
• WFS OpenOrganizations