by Derek Fields
A well-curated Confluence site starts with an approach to governance. As I stated yesterday, “Curating a well-organized Confluence site requires thoughtful planning, consistent maintenance, and strategic use of built-in features.” Governance describes how decisions are made about curating your Confluence site. In subsequent posts, I will discuss a range of options and decisions that a governance body may want to make to keep your Confluence site humming along. Today, I want to focus on the importance of having a process for making those decisions.
Forms of Governance
There are several approaches to governance. You and your organization will need to choose the approach that best meets your needs and your culture. The two most prevalent approaches are to have a designated curator(s) and to establish a Center of Excellence. Less successful is to allow individual space administrators carte blanche to manage their own spaces, which I will discuss at the end of this post.
- Designated Curator: In some organizations, the best choice is to have an individual or group of people designated as the curator. The number of people that you designate will depend on the size of your organization and the uptake of Confluence as the organizational repository for information. Smaller organizations may create a job title specifically for Confluence curation and hire someone to fill this role. In my experience, the ideal person for this dedicated role is a technical writer. Technical writers understand the intricacies of quality communication and how to translate from jargon-filled documents written by engineers that often gloss over key information that the original authors incorrectly assumed was common knowledge. In especially large organizations that need multiple curators, this may be a team that is empowered to make and enforce the key curation decisions.
- Confluence Center of Excellence: In smaller organizations, where only a single curator, full or part-time, is needed, they are often well served by leading or facilitating a Center of Excellence (CoE). A CoE can be comprised of volunteers who express a special interest in the quality of the Confluence site, or it can be a designated group representing the various interested and affected teams across the organization. In either case, the CoE is ultimately responsible for the quality of the site.
In either case, whether curation is invested in a single person, a team of curators, or a Center of Excellence, the Curator is responsible for setting the standards for Confluence use, responding to requests for changes or additions to the standards, communicating the standards, auditing compliance to standards, providing training and guidance to Confluence users and creating and collecting metrics that will lead to continuous improvement of the Confluence site.
Avoid this trap
One of the mistakes that I see customers making with respect to Confluence is to allow too much local autonomy to individual space admins. If you are new to Confluence, then it is useful to know that a Confluence site is comprised of Spaces and that each Space holds pages of various types. Each space has one or more individuals who are designated as space administrators. With a space, the administrator can restrict or provide access to the space, they can create and promote space-specific templates, they can use advanced features such as CSS styles to influence the look-and-feel of the Confluence space. Generally, space admins control many of the features of a space.
The problem that arises when space admins are given autonomy to customize their space as suits the specific needs of their team or space users is that the overall Confluence site becomes a series of disconnected spaces, each appearing to exist on its own without relating to the other spaces across the site. This negates one of the great powers of Confluence, which is to allow bringing information together from across the organization, regardless of which team may have created it. For example, it is possible to create a page the collects all of the how-to articles that have been created in the many different knowledge domains. If these pages all use different templates or have different labels, then the task of creating this global how-to directory becomes impossible.
In the articles that follow, I will describe different techniques and tips that illustrate best-practices in curating your Confluence site. While these can be used by individual space admins and even individual users, I encourage you to start by defining and adopting a site-wide governance approach. Not only will this streamline the decision-making process, it will demonstrate your organization’s commitment to a quality Confluence site.
This article is 2 of 5 in the “Curating with Confluence” series. Check out the other posts here, as they are added. I hope that these tips and tricks will let you achieve Confluence nirvana.
Originally posted February 25, 2025 on the Atlassian Community site by Derek Fields https://community.atlassian.com/forums/New-to-Confluence-articles/Curating-Confluence-Day-2/ba-p/2954120