# Explore Patterns

More and more patterns are contributed to this book by the InnerSource Commons community. That is awesome!

Now how to make it easy for readers to discover the patterns that can help them in their particular situation?

For this purpose we provide this mind map. It **categorizes patterns based on the different phases of an InnerSource Program**, and the challenges that might appear in the respective phases.

![Mind Map of InnerSource Patterns](../../pattern-categorization/innersource-program-mind-map.png)

## Improve this Mind Map

If you notice anything in this mind map that looks wrong, please [open an issue](https://github.com/InnerSourceCommons/InnerSourcePatterns/issues), describing the problem and the fix that should be made.

Further if you have other ideas for improving the discoverability of these patterns, or want to make this mind map better, review the documentation of our [Pattern Categorization](https://github.com/InnerSourceCommons/InnerSourcePatterns/blob/main/pattern-categorization/README.md) approach, and also check how to [contribute to this book](contribute.md).

## References

The idea for categorizing patterns like this is loosely based a description in [Thoughts on an InnerSource Pattern Language](https://drive.google.com/file/d/13AY8glCOdpLOVuz7cVD6QOB8d2xbHCS1/view) by Tim Yao, Bob Hanmer and Padma Sudarsan (2018). For specifics see slide 15 in that slide deck.
