Organization Engagement¶

The knowledge that makes an open metadata ecosystem valuable is spread across the whole organization. The people who understand what a data field really means, which regulation applies to a process, or why a system was built the way it was, are rarely the people running the metadata catalog. They are busy doing their own jobs.

The Organization Engagement pattern is about closing that gap. It covers the capabilities that describe your organization in open metadata, connect responsibilities to the individuals who hold them, bring people together in communities, and lower the effort of contributing to the point where a subject-matter expert can add their knowledge as part of their normal work.

Describing the organization¶

Before people can be engaged, the organization itself needs to be described. Egeria captures this from two complementary directions: how the organization is staffed, and what the organization does.

Engaging the individual through roles¶

A description of an organization is not, by itself, engaging. What engages an individual is being named.

Egeria represents responsibilities as roles - effectively slots, or vacancies, in a team, project or community - that individuals are appointed to for a span of time. A role has a scope: someone is a manager of a specific team, or the owner of specific systems, not of everything. A role can have several people appointed to it, and the appointment history is retained, so it is possible to see who held a responsibility at a point in the past.

An experienced person typically holds several roles at once, each with its own scope, skills and call on their time.

Roles are what connect a governance definition to a person's working day. A governance responsibility that is written down but not assigned is a document; the same responsibility attached to a role, with a named appointee, is somebody's job. The same mechanism drives the to-dos that Egeria assigns when a governance action needs a human decision, and the notifications and subscriptions managed through the Notification Manager API that tell someone their attention is needed.

Building communities¶

Some work does not belong to any single team. Cross-cutting initiatives - governance programs, sustainability, data literacy - need people from across the organization who volunteer their time and expertise alongside their day job.

A community is the anchor point for this kind of long-running, cross-organization endeavour. Communities have members with graded roles - observer, contributor, administrator and leader - so people can participate at the level they are able to. They gather forums for discussion, collections of useful resources and external references, and the ordinary feedback mechanisms of comments, replies, reviews, tags and likes.

Communities are maintained through the Community Matters API, their contributions and discussion through the Feedback Manager API, and the work they spawn through the Project Manager API.

Connecting people to the governance domains¶

A governance domain is an area of governance that needs collaboration across the organization, and so cannot simply be handed to one team. Each domain is typically led by an executive, supported by a community, and delivered through projects.

This is where the previous three sections come together. A governance domain has:

• Governance definitions - the drivers, policies and controls that describe what the domain is trying to achieve. These are maintained through the Governance Officer API.
• Roles - the governance officer who leads the domain, and the owners, stewards and custodians who carry its responsibilities, each linked to the appointees who hold them.
• A community - to bring the people working in the domain together for education, status updates and discussion.
• A scope - the teams, business capabilities and resources the domain's definitions apply to.

Governance domains are defined as valid metadata values referenced by the domainIdentifier property, so an organization can add domains of its own to the standard set. This means the different governance domains can operate with their own leadership, terminology and priorities, while still sharing one description of the organization and one catalog of resources.

Making it easy to contribute¶

None of this works if contributing is hard. Subject-matter experts will not learn a metadata tool, and they should not have to.

Literate governance is Egeria's answer. Borrowing from Donald Knuth's literate programming, it lets governance officers, stewards and experts author a single document that explains why something exists in plain language, right next to the commands that create it. Dr.Egeria processes these Markdown documents and creates the corresponding definitions in Egeria's knowledge graph.

Because the document is ordinary human-readable Markdown, it can be drafted in any editor, circulated for peer review, argued over, corrected and reprocessed as many times as it takes. The command language includes report requests, so the author can check that what they intended is what actually got loaded. The result is that the artefact people collaborate on and the artefact that configures the ecosystem are the same artefact.

Dr.Egeria is not the only low-effort route in:

• My Egeria supports the multi-step tasks people perform - working through to-dos, meetings, reviews, and the management of their roles, communities and teams - as either a terminal or browser application.
• Egeria Explorer and The Catalog let people find and read the metadata without needing to know where it is stored.
• The Feedback Manager API supports the smallest contributions of all - a comment, a tag, a rating - which are often where engagement starts.

Engagement in practice¶

The Coco Pharmaceuticals scenarios show these capabilities being used together:

• Building the multi-faceted governance team follows Jules Keeper as he realizes he cannot fix Coco Pharmaceuticals' problems from the data governance domain alone. He and his colleagues divide the work across governance domains, appoint a leader to each, and capture their governance drivers as Dr.Egeria documents so that the whole leadership team can review and build on them.

• Initiating a sustainability initiative shows a cross-organization program being built from scratch: a new governance domain added to the standard set, a small team drawn from finance, manufacturing and information architecture, executive sponsors, and a community that reaches the parts of the business the team does not.

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