We need a Support IDK

Request for comments

Need

tl;dr Acronyms are used way too much and it's hard to know what these mean at all times. Having a reference for all the acronyms we throw around would really help new people with different backgrounds understand what is meant.

So this has been a frustrating issue for me since I started at GitLab. We use acronyms all the time, but they're not ever really explained anywhere. Per our communication guidelines:

1. Do not use acronyms when you can avoid them. Acronyms have the effect of excluding people from the conversation if they are not familiar with a particular term. Example: instead of MR, write merge request (MR).
2. If acronyms are used, expand them at least once in the conversation or document and define them in the document using Kramdown abbreviation syntax. Alternatively, link to the definition.
3. If you don’t know the meaning of an acronym, ask. It’s always ok to speak up.

I just tried to search for "First response time" in our handbook and no Support documents came up. "Next response time" returns an OKR (Objective-Key Results) from 2019* . To be honest, I've always also just assumed that that's what they stood for and when I first started I wasn't sure which was for new tickets since I could also interpret NRT to mean New (ticket) Response Time.

Another one that really got me, which was outside of the support team was 'MVC', which in GitLab usually means 'minimum viable change', but it my mind means 'model-view-controller'. Truly had no idea what the person was talking about until Jane read the comment outline and expanded what MVC meant.

*As pointed out by @imason, I should have expanded OKR, which is fair, I shall place it here since that doc does actually spell it out, but if it didn't, I would not.

Approach

Retroactively fixing our current documentation would be hard if not impossible since there are many acronyms used throughout docs. We should be conscientious of this going forward when modifying / writing documents.

Previous employer (I believe vmware) had a vmware.wtf page, which defined all the acronyms the company would use and what they could mean. I think we could have a GitLab Support IDK document which covers all the acronyms that support / GitLab may use.

Benefit

Fewer misunderstandings and feelings of exclusion / uncertainty when communicating with each other.

Better adherence to GitLab culture

Competition / Alternatives

I've heard of some AI offering automatic conversations in documents, but that would be a lot of work for our handbooks.