Why publish patterns in a staged approach?

[spier]

We have a staged approach to publishing our patterns. For the lack of better terminology, I am using Staging and Production to describe the two different states.

When in Staging, a pattern lives just in our GitHub repo.
Then later when it goes to Production, is published to our online book.

Staging / repo: https://github.com/InnerSourceCommons/InnerSourcePatterns
Production / book: https://patterns.innersourcecommons.org

Why are we doing this? Why not just publish all patterns to the book straight away? There are various pros and cons of either approach. Below I describe the current approach and intended purpose behind it.

Explanation of the current approach

property	Staging	Production	purpose
publishing target	repo	book (gitbook)	These two stages allow for iterative improvements of the pattern, before we expose it to a wider audience.
URL stability	unstable	stable	Other people talking about InnerSource may be referencing our patterns. Therefore we aim to keep both pattern title as well as pattern URL stable, once it is published to our book. This should prevent broken links and make patterns uniquely identifyable.
number of known instances	0	1-n	Known Instances are organizations that have confirmed that they are using a given pattern. We publish patterns to our book once we have at least 1 known instance. Prior to that we consider the patterns a draft/idea or maybe even just as a description of a problem, without a solution. There are many patterns in our repo that are in the draft stage since many years
time to merge	days	weeks	We want to help our contributors to get there ideas integrated to the patterns as quickly as possible, while keeping the quality of our content high. These are tradeoffs, as you can tell.
maturity / content requirements	Initial	Structured	Maturity of the pattern as per our contributor handbook. The higher the maturity, the stricter the content requirements. This also means that we can be less strict on the Initial patterns, and publish them faster.

Other notes

Random thoughts that I had when writing this. Happy to discuss this further, as I don't have fully formed opinions on these.

• The contributor handbook defines a 3rd stage called "Validated". However we are not using this stage yet.
• Our current working practices that entirely new patterns are never published to the book straight away. i.e. even if they have a known instance already, we would still keep them just in our repo first. The idea here is to give the pattern some more time to get feedback from the community, before it goes live in our book. Note: this working practice is different from what we are describing in our contributor handbook, which could be problematic. However nobody has complained about it yet.

Pros/Cons Exploration

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