Contributing to the Playbook

The Playbook is a living document, it should be continuously updated to reflect our practices. It’s also an important reference and mostly public, so making changes can have a big impact.

You are very strongly encouraged to propose changes, but you should be very careful about making those changes.

How the content management system works

Outline is the content management system for the Playbook. Access to Outline is limited to dxw employees, and sign in is by Google SSO.

The Playbook is represented in Outline as a collection, essentially a folder. Collections contain documents (pages), and those documents can be arranged hierarchically.

Like Google Docs, permissions cascade in Outline, so if you have edit access to a collection or a document, you also get edit access to everything nested under it. Unlike Google Docs, permissions cascade irreversibly, so if you have edit access to a collection, then there is no way to limit your access to a document in that collection. Pages cannot be shared publicly.

Proposing changes

You can propose changes to a document by selecting some text and making a comment. For more complex changes, copy the content into a Google Doc, make changes there, and link to that.

Making changes

To edit a document, click the edit button in the top right. Edits go live as soon as you save them. There are no drafts or approval steps. This means that they must be done with care.

You can make minor changes like correcting typos, fixing broken links, clarifications etc. without consulting anyone.

Before making any more significant changes, you must get approval from the owner of the section that you are editing. You can propose changes by adding a comment or by copying the content into a Google Doc and linking to that.

Changes are posted to the #dxw-playbook channel on Slack, and a log is automatically kept in Outline so we can revert changes if needed.

Making documents private

By default all documents within the Playbook collection are publicly visible. To make one private, simply add [private] to the end of the title, but remember that if you are linking to a private page from a public page, the page title may be visible, so be careful what you include in the title.

Privacy must be applied to every page individually, it does not cascade.

Viewing a document’s change history

To view the change history of a document, click the three dots in the top right and select ‘History’.

Last updated: 26 November 2025