OSS’ Rosetta Stone

When working on OSS projects, I find that linking or reference keys are so valuable at so many levels. Not just data management within the OSS database, but project management, design activities, task assignment / delivery, etc.

People might call things all sorts of different names, which leads to confusion. It seems like every single one of us is talking in a different dialect of OSS. That’s why working together with the same people over time should improve the language gap (naturally).

When working with new clients, vendors and colleagues, I try to spend time up-front getting to a common language (see here and here for further articles)

But for today’s article, let me cite a specific recent example. When a large organisation has lots of projects underway and many people are maintaining project lists, but each with a slightly (or massively!!) different variant of the project name, there can be confusion, and possibly duplication. But introduce a project number and it becomes a lot easier to compare project lists (if everyone cites the project number in their documentation).

Trying to pattern match text / language can be really difficult. But if data sets have linking keys, we can easily use Excel’s vlookup function (or the human brain, or any other equivalent tool of choice) to make comparison a whole lot easier.

Linking keys could be activity codes in a WBS, a device name in a log file, a file number, a process number, part numbers in a designer’s pick-lists, device configuration code, etc.

Correlation and reconcile tasks are really important in OSS. An OSS does a lot of data set joins at application / database level. We can take a lead from code-level use of linking keys.

Just like the Rosetta stone proved to be the key to unlocking Egyptian hieroglyphs, introducing linking keys and glossary sheets for common terminologies can be useful for translating different “languages” at many levels in OSS projects.

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