Handbook Home

Suddenly Remote Handbook #

Suddenly Remote #

Suddenly changing how an entire organization works is very disruptive and suddenly being unable to share space is a novel problem. Most disaster recovery plans and business continuity plans lack aspects of continuing to work when you can’t be co-located with co-workers.

See https://allremote.info for more information.

Handbook Template #

A suggestion for many companies finding themselves in this remote position is to create a handbook. The way a handbook centralizes knowledge of how an organization operates (or should operate) is very helpful. None of the existing templates seemed like a proper starting point, so I created this one.

See the Handbook Page for more information.

The Importance of Handbook #

The ultimate goal is that non-technical resources could use this template to create a starting point for an organization unit or company to use for a handbook.

Wiki Handbooks Don’t Scale #

At GitLab, like many others, the handbook started as an informal collection of documents and wikis. The way Wikis work doesn’t lend themselves to handbooks for several reasons, which we have outlined on the Handbook Usage page.

Getting Started #

This handbook template can be leveraged by anyone in the world by following these steps. Expect a video walk-through soon.

Create a GitLab.com account
Create a Group for your company or organization
Create a new project in that group
Set the new project as Import project and choose GitLab Export
Download the handbook-project-export.tar.gz from this site.
Name the project handbook or something like that
Set visibility to public if you don’t mind the internet watching you build your handbook, keep it private otherwise.
There are some pre-loaded issues in the project for establishing a workflow and custom domain, complete those
Delete the sample content and replace it with your own. Parts of the sample data exist to demonstrate capabilities of the template.

Provide Feedback #

If this template lets you down and doesn’t make sense, please provide feedback so we can improve the template for future use. To submit a change to the template or sample content, use the Fork + Merge Request workflow. Since this is a template project, git history may be rewritten and issues are part of the template content, so for clarity and ease-of-use the regular workflow is not supported for this project.