At the beginning of the year, I was introduced to Martin Günther. Whereas I come from a functional programming and data modeling background, Martin is an expert in Domain-Driven Design Collaborative Modeling. It quickly became clear that we see a lot of value in each others tools and techniques, while at the same time we realized that there are some holes in our “own” techniques: On the one hand, the DDD community seems to missing a systematic approach to date modeling that functional programming techniques bring to the table. On the other hand, while FP has the tools, the community is not always the most approachable and communication (and collaboration) with domain experts is not our strong suit, especially in groups of people with diverse (even non-technical) backgorunds.
After a short but intense collaboration, we came up with “Collaborative Data Modeling”: A sticky-note based technique, based on the idea of “design recipes” from the book Schreibe dein Programm by Michael Sperber and Herbert Klaeren, which establishes a systematic modeling approach.
We were lucky enough to be accepted to DDD Europe in Antwerp this year with our workshop “Collaborative Data Modeling: Discovering Domain Types Through Linguistic Cues” and came home with lots of great experiences and good feedback.
We started writing down the technique as well. While it’s still a work in progress, you can read up on it here.
We are even more lucky in that Andrea Magnorsky invited us to do an online-version of our workshop for Virtual Domain-Driven Design. If you’re interested, come join us on September 3rd, 2026 online. We’re looking forward to modling with you!
