Dojo4 Playbook

After being in business for over a decade, we’ve learned some things. As a reference for ourselves, our team members, our clients, our community, and anyone, anywhere who doesn’t feel the need to reinvent the wheel, we’ve documented both our operational approach to running a small agency business where people like to work and writing good software that makes both developers and clients happy.

We used Github Pages, hosted directly from the Dojo4 Github repository, to publish it because it was free and easy to do so for our purposes, and because it made it simple for us to offer this as open-sourced “code” for building and running a small custom software agency. We hope people will feel free to use all and any part of the Playbook licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), which allows re-users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use.

The Playbook includes sections on:

  • governance

  • legal (including all of our legal agreements that are also free and licensed for re-use)

  • policies

  • roles and responsibilities

  • co-op protocols and processes

  • resources

  • operations

  • HR

  • communications

  • community engagement

  • office ritual

  • technology philosophy

  • business tools

  • project management

  • estimating

  • design workflow

  • development workflow

  • how to spin up a project

  • developer environment checklist

  • technical tooling (Docker, Github, applications stacks, development platforms)

It’s still a work in progress, and hopefully always will be, so expect content gaps and room for improvement.

Please find and use the Dojo4 Playbook and submit comments through issues or pull requests at github.com/dojo4/dojo4.github.io.

Company Culture, Open SourceCorey Kohn