Passion project: A Glossary for understanding important terms

Passion project: A Glossary for understanding important terms

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

OpenProject is an open source software – with many features, modules and possibilities for users to successfully collaborate and manage projects. With a wide variety of features comes a great deal of complexity, also when it comes to terminology: What exactly is a work package in OpenProject? How is a group defined? What kind of dashboards are there in OpenProject? These terms and many more are now defined in the form of a clearly arranged glossary!

Having a glossary of OpenProject was a long-term goal of team marketing at OpenProject. Now, we took the opportunity of Passion Time to finally putting this goal into action and published the glossary last week.

Passion project: Create a multi-language glossary about OpenProject.
Why: Each project management software uses a different vocabulary that sometimes requires explanation.
How: Quickly look up technical terms when working with our software or browsing our communication channels.
What: We supplement the documentation of OpenProject with a glossary that briefly defines the most important terms and refers to further sources.

Your benefit from the OpenProject Glossary

Here are some use cases where the new glossary of OpenProject will be a great support for you:

  1. Starting with OpenProject: We know it can be quite a challenge to discover all the great features and possibilities of OpenProject. Take advantage of our training and consulting offers, and always have the glossary open in the background to quickly look up new terms coming up.
  2. Onboarding new colleagues to OpenProject: When new employees join your organization, they may face a learning curve in understanding OpenProject’s terminology. Provide them the glossary during the onboarding process and enable them to quickly work independently in your project management.
  3. Improved communication in general: A glossary supports a consistent use of terminology across the application, website and documentation. This is especially helpful if many people work together and ensures fewer misunderstandings.
  4. Translating OpenProject: As we are an open source software, many people help to improve the application and also provide translations. A glossary offers standardized terms for translations, which ensures consistent use of the translated terms and therefore a better understanding across many languages.

What’s next

Within the 2 weeks of Passion Project, we managed to create and publish the glossary of English terms. We will continue to work on it in the coming months, among other tasks. The most important thing now is the translation into our supported languages, mainly German, French and Spanish. However, since care and consistent use of terms is essential here as well, we ask for a little patience.

In addition, the glossary is a living document that must be maintained in parallel with the further development of the software. As new features will be released, new terms might be in need of explanation.

Now take a look at the new glossary, share it with your colleagues and maybe bookmark it – especially if you use OpenProject several times a week! 🥳