We’re pleased to announce the launch of a small side-project that we’ve been working on for the past few days, the Content Strategy Design Pattern Library (http://patterns.contentini.com).

Apart from having five nouns in its name, the project is also something of an experiment for us. The website is an open collaborative space – a wiki – where we hope to collect and document commonly used or interesting solutions to web content strategy problems, large and small.

We’ve kicked it off with about 20 patterns, ranging from the often used (“Pre-Moderate Comments“) to the lesser known (“Teaser Headline“). We’re not too concerned about what is and isn’t strictly Content Strategy – if it has something to do with web content, we want to include it.

What we don’t know is what will happen next. Collaborative design patterns have been successfully used in software engineering (e.g. the Perl Design Pattern wiki) and user interface design (e.g. the Open Source Design Pattern Library), but content strategists are fewer in number and (arguably) less technical than practitioners in either of these domains. Unfortunately the wiki-style platform still isn’t the most user-friendly system on the web, but we’ve added some instructions and have made a few custom changes to the code to make it as easy to add and edit content as possible.

If you want to try adding or editing a pattern, please do! A good place to get started is on the instructions page. We’re not looking for perfectly formed or worded solutions – if you have an idea, even just the start of one, add it. Our initial patterns certainly aren’t perfectly documented, but that’s the main advantage of wikis: these ideas can be slowly iterated and improved on over time.

As usual, we welcome your comments below: could this be useful? Is there a better platform? Would you be more willing to contribute if the project was hosted on its own, non-agency affiliated domain? Let us know.