Thoughts on user experience - patterns-dev/patterns GitHub Wiki

Can you in any way describe what you see here in your brain while you were writing this?

Ok, imagine there are more projects than there are people, this is certainly true for me, some projects are personal, are business, or need happen at a community level. The value of patterns is that they are the first thing you start with, they are like a specification that isn't specific, that you refer to along the way to ensure that you haven't lost sight of the purpose.

As an example, say there is something obviously wrong with our street, and as neighbours we mean to do something about it. Where we should start is by assembling the relevant patterns, this clarifies the needs in our own minds, but also gives us something to show to other people without getting specific about plans. The main point is that we should start with the patterns and work from there.

So if there is a website where I can search for "street" or "community garden" or "workplace" and find little collections of patterns that other people have already assembled for their own projects, I can just read them and learn, or create a copy to adapt into my own 'project language' - Is this a known term? Lev used it.

But this 'project language', no matter how good, is someone else's work, I don't just need to rename it then swap some patterns in and out, if I'm sharing this with other people, trying to enthuse them, then we need to be able to make the work our own, by editing the patterns to suit our own project, rewording them to add our own voice, or even translating into our own language - but in doing this we can't be precious or worry about messing up someone else's work, this isn't a wikipedia page. With a wiki page the process is a cycle of "perfect and improve", like an open source library, but this needs to be "fork, fork, fork", creating something new each time.

Yes there can be some route for genuine universally applicable improvements to get moved 'upstream', but this will be relatively rare and won't change work that has already been 'forked', the system needs a process where quality work is ranked and floats to the top anyway.

Can you describe the window you see in your brain? How things are placed? What you do first or last?

In my imagination it looks like this: each project is a 'story' in the system. So a clueless visitor arrives at a story, either from a search or a link, it appears like a designer's sample board, say a grid of photos with titles or short text, these are each a link to a pattern and you can follow them get more detail. The owners of the story can rearrange this grid and add some explanation for the project as a whole - This isn't just a nice organiser for patterns, it is a campaigning tool to build a vision for a community project - With the option to take someone else's vision and make it your own.

Initially the site would be primed with a single story consisting of free versions of the 253 patterns, and if you like, the patterns in this story can be maintained and improved wiki-style by a select clique of users that, among other things, trawl the rest of the site looking for stuff to bring 'upstream'. But this story doesn't have any special prominence, the stories that you find on the 'front page' or in searches are the ones that are ranked by the system.

Or, perhaps, name an app or web site that you think has some of these qualities?

Not without using buzzwords like 'curating'. I've never seen Pinterest because my employer blocks it, but maybe this is a model of the interaction.