How to contribute to ITIL

You have several easy options to choose from:
1. Be an author. Wait 3-5 years for the next ITIL Refresh. Tender for one of the books. Be one of about a dozen people worldwide to win a tender. Devote a year of your life to writing a book.
2. Know an author. Get networking now: you have 3-5 years to guess who the next ones will be and get into their professional circle. Then persuade them your idea is better than theirs.
3. Contact OGC to tell them you have some content to contribute. There is no documented process to do this, not any advertised contact point, but OGC are British government bureaucrats so you should find them helpful and communicative if you just send stuff off to any old address you can find. Once you have their attention, they will put you in touch with the next authors. See 2 above.
4. Forget it.


See the IT Skeptic's latest article for ITSMWatch for more detail on this open and helpful process..

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Set in stone and stuck in the mud

There's just no way that this can develop fast enough to maintain relevance to business change, even though the most skepitcal of us will note that is all cyclic e.g. Mainframe->Client Server->Thin Client...

Unless the OGC have figured out it's a 5-6 year cycle?

Maybe there's a need for an "Open Methods" group somewhere? I am getting really cheesed off with the ammount of accreditation action that I am getting in my inbox...

One final thought for the accreditation companies ....Updating all those cheat sheets every 5 years is a tough call...

RedMule

RedMule
RedMule Blog

It is going to wrest control of ITIL away from the closed group

I like the 5-6 year cycle idea ;-D though to be fair to the OGC, the processes should not change (much) when the technology changes.

Open methods is what the article is all about. It is inevitable and it is going to wrest control of ITIL away from the closed group who control it now.

Value add outside commoditised processes

Agree that the commoditised or generic processes shouldn't change that much, however, if this is all about aligning IT to the business, the value add is somewhere else, most likely buried in the details.

Which possibly leaves us with a core group maintaining low value commoditised processes and the open methods advocates pushing forward the real value add. The OGC et al have a part to play in that, which to be fair to the original ITIL team was what they envisaged when they started.

RedMule

RedMule
RedMule Blog

5. Collaberation

Or how about collaberation?

The ITIL Open Guide is a wiki dedicated to ITIL. That means that YOU can contribute and drive it forward in terms of content and direction. By YOU, I mean the ITIL using public. It also houses the voluntary ITIL Certification Register.

You can find it here: ITIL Open Guide

So far it has expaned nicely, with quite a few contributors. It will be interesting to see how the project develops.

Read the article referenced

Read the article referenced above where the ITIL Open Guide is mentioned.

I don't think it is that open. Most pages have the message "Page locked. Please contact us if you wish to edit.". Put another way: ask us because you only get to contribute if we approve. This isn't the spirit of a Wiki, as anyone who has contributed to Wikipedia will know. Moderation has its place, but only after debate and consensus have had a go.

Absolutely Wrong

That is totally and completely incorrect and absolutely unfair. The reality is:

1) A very small minority of pages are locked because they were being vandalized (eg: porn links) on an almost daily basis

2) "Page locked. Please contact us if you wish to edit." means exactly what it says. An email to the mod causes the page to be unlocked whilst the edit is done.

From this comment, it seems that you see only what you want to see - which is pretty far removed from the truth.

I hope your other posts are more informed and reasonable than this one.

  • By Rose (not verified) at Fri, 2006-11-10 21:41
  • reply

Danger of absolutes

Reference your absolute position, I would note that there are many informed and reasonable people who are a little tired of such polarised and absolute views. Pragmatic and reasonable views in my experience are anything but polarised and extreme. To give you an example of why such views are not healthy, perhaps you should consider the lifespan of the average of lemming!

Now lets get down to some open sensible debate about how to do things better, as opposed to line the coffers of the moribund compliance brigade. What's that if you can't do teach, if you can't teach get into policing (compliance)... We have plenty of room for manouvre so lets up the ante!

RedMule

RedMule
RedMule Blog

plenty of wikis these days and they don't lock their pages

Rose, I am simply reflecting the external appearance of the website. Perception is reality, more so than ever with the internet. There are plenty of wikis these days and they don't lock their pages. They use captchas, and yes they use manual labour to clean up, but they leave the doors open... I think publicly contributed ITIL is a great idea, if only to keep OGC on their toes. There has been a recent burst of activity on your site but it also gives the impression that it is not gaining momentum. Perhaps the two are linked...

This site here got spammed a while ago and I had to clean up a couple of hundred comments, but you are still free to post.

Perception: The Reasons

I have explained why those particular pages are locked (spambots), but bear in mind that this is only a temporary solution. There is an important balance here: between making life as easy as possible for contributors, and preventing wholesale abuse.

Because it is early days we have chosen not to force any login/membership on people who simply want to add value. At some point that will have to change, and at that point the page-lock of the small minority of pages will be removed (because we will have an overall login/captcha type mechanism there). It's extremely unfair criticizing it for implementation of a temporary and limited defensive solution, and use that to beat down the whole wiki.

The fact is that The Open Guide, except for a small number of pages (which were taking serious spambot hits), is totally open to everyone. It is there for people to contribute to and expand. And yes RedMule, that is an absolute fact, so I have no idea what your reference is meant to be to.

Contributions do come in peaks and troughs, it is true, but the Open Guide is there for the long haul, so there is no rush. I would rather have that, with the site almost democratically available when people have something important to add, than have it full of nonsense/noise. The direction and volume of the wiki is basically down to where the ITIL sphere takes it.

The motives are positive, the concept is positive, and I just feel it deserves decent and not negative press.

  • By Rose (not verified) at Sat, 2006-11-11 11:53
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