Guides naming conventions

[coreycaitlin]

This is related to #31, but slightly separate. Here's the current list of names in the nav on the guides page. I've included the title shown while in the guide, if different, in parentheses.

• 18F Delivery: Partnership Playbook
• Accessibility (Accessibility Guide)
• Analytics (Analytics Standards)
• Agile (Agile Principles & Practices)
• APIs (18F API Standards)
• Testing Cookbook
• Automated Testing Playbook
• Before You Ship
• Content Guide (18F Content Guide)
• Design Methods (Methods)
• Development Environment Guide (18F Development Environment Guide)
• Federalist Content Guide (A content guide for the Federalist platform)
• Frontend (Frontend Guides)
• Grouplet Playbook
• Guides Template (18F Guides Template)
• Inter-Agency Agreements with 18F (18F Interagency Agreement Site)
• Joining 18F! (Joining 18F)
• Lean Product Design
• Open Source Guide (18F Open Source Style Guide)

Some questions this raises:

• When do we include "18F" in the name of a guide? This seems like it could be useful for specifying when the guidance is 18F-specific and unlikely to be applicable more broadly, or when we think it's important to stress the specificity.
• As has come up before, we may want to standardize use of playbook, guide, standards, handbook, and/or cookbook.

[wslack]

I like the idea of having "18F" in the main title of the guide homepage, but not in the guides nav, for people linking directly. Otherwise, it looks like we're doing a decent job with the nav titles only saying "18F" when the subject matter is about 18F.

[mbland]

I like the idea of the presence of "18F" in the title being a signal that the advice is very 18F-specific. With this and the naming standardization, as I suggested in #31, perhaps we can get a design studio going with UX and Content folks to forge the One Ring once and for all.

[coreycaitlin]

I like both these ideas — and agree with @wslack that we need solid indicators (whether or not it's in the title) of where these guides came from.

I wonder if deciding how 18F-specific each guide is will be simple or surprisingly complicated. Again, I think a design studio would tell us a lot.

[coreycaitlin]

Based on a brief card sort exercise with @mbland, @wslack, and @brethauer, we seemed to agree that the following things listed in the guides nav are not, in fact, guides:

• Inter-agency agreements
• Joining 18F
• Intake
• Federalist content guide
• 18F handbook
• 18F edu training materials

This suggests that we need a definition for what is a guide! Here's a straw sentence or two:

18F Guides are documents about how we work (our process, standards, and patterns). 18F teams write guides to help colleagues, partners, and peers learn from our experience and work together more smoothly.

I'm not sure this excludes all the things that didn't feel as guide-like, but it helps sort out a few of them.