lorin/resilience-engineering: A Curated Reading Map for Resilience Engineering

What lorin/resilience-engineering actually is

This is a set of Markdown notes, not a library and not a tool. The README describes the document as containing "notes about people active in resilience engineering, as well as some influential researchers who are no longer with us, organized alphabetically", plus people and papers from cognitive systems engineering and naturalistic decision-making. The repository also carries a homepage alias, resiliencepapers.club, which John Allspaw is credited for.

The audience is narrow and specific: engineers, SREs and researchers who keep hearing terms like Safety-II, drift into failure or graceful extensibility and want to know which paper to read first. The README answers that directly by pointing to intro.md, titled "Resilience engineering: Where do I start?". If you want a book, a course or a certification, this repository is the wrong shape. It is a map, and the map is maintained by hand.

How the index is organized: people, big ideas, topics

The top level of the repository is flat Markdown plus a few images and a slide deck. Alongside README.md you find STAMP.md, graceful-extensibility.md, laws.md, intro.md, topics.md and a topics/ directory, with boundary.graffle, boundary.png, risk-management-framework.graffle and risk-management-framework.png as diagrams, plus paries-keynote-2015.pptx and resilience-doodle.jpg.

The README itself has two long indexes. The People section lists names from Colette Alexander to John Wreathall, each with a short biography and, for some, a Selected publications list. The README is explicit that these lists are not comprehensive: they are ones the maintainer has read or added to a to-read list. A second section, Some big ideas, links concepts to their originators, including the adaptive universe (David Woods), the dynamic safety model (Jens Rasmussen), Safety-II (Erik Hollnagel), graceful extensibility (Woods), the ETTO efficiency-tradeoff principle (Hollnagel), drift into failure (Sidney Dekker), STAMP (Nancy Leveson), robust yet fragile (John C. Doyle) and polycentric governance (Elinor Ostrom).

Two annotation tags appear on links. BH marks Ben Hutchinson's Safety & Performance Research Summaries blog, and TWRR marks Thai Wood's Resilience Roundup newsletter. Those tags are the closest thing to a review layer: they tell you a summary exists before you commit to a paper.

Reading your first paper from the repository

There is no package to install and no build step. The README gives no install instructions at all: it points readers at the homepage alias, resiliencepapers.club, and at the repository itself, where the same Markdown files render on GitHub. So the practical route is to read the files in place, starting with the orientation file the README recommends for people who are unsure where to begin. That file is intro.md, titled "Resilience engineering: Where do I start?", and it sits at the top level of the repository next to README.md, topics.md, laws.md, STAMP.md and graceful-extensibility.md.

From intro.md, the README's Some big ideas list is the fastest way to pick a concept and jump to the person who wrote about it. If you prefer a reference manager, the README notes that the papers linked here are also in the Zotero res-eng group, at zotero.org/groups/2335189/res-eng/items. That group is the practical way to pull the same reading list into a citation manager instead of copying links by hand. The README also points to a YouTube playlist on resilience engineering, cognitive systems engineering and human factors concepts in software contexts, maintained by John Allspaw, for readers who would rather watch a talk than read a paper.

Where the repository stops short

The README never states a licence in its own text. The repository carries LICENSE.md, but the metadata marks the licence NOASSERTION, which means a reader cannot assume standard reuse terms without opening that file. If you plan to republish the annotations or fold them into training material, read LICENSE.md first; the README does not discuss redistribution at all.

There is also no versioning story. The repository has no releases, and the README does not describe a changelog, a deprecation policy or a review process for entries. The only maintenance signal given is a note that there are now multiple contributors, linked to the GitHub contributors graph. Entries are added by hand, so coverage is uneven: some people have a full Selected publications list, others have a biography and a link or two. Treat the People section as a starting bibliography, not a complete one, and the README says as much when it calls the lists non-comprehensive.

Finally, the framing is software-flavoured but the field is not. The README pulls in cognitive systems engineering and naturalistic decision-making, and several big ideas come from aviation, healthcare and safety science. A reader looking for code, an API or a runnable fault-injection harness will not find one here; the README links to writing about fault injection in production, not to a tool.

Compared with a general citation database

The obvious alternative is a scholarly index such as Google Scholar or a Zotero library you build yourself. The difference is editorial. A citation database returns everything matching a query and ranks by citation counts; this repository returns the subset one maintainer and a handful of contributors have read, grouped by person and by concept, with tags telling you which entries already have a public summary.

That editorial layer is the whole value. Searching "resilience engineering" in a general index gives you thousands of hits with no indication of which one introduces Safety-II and which one applies it to a single hospital ward. The README's big ideas section does that mapping work by hand. The trade-off is coverage: a citation database will surface a new paper the day it appears, while this index only grows when a contributor adds it. The README also points outward rather than duplicating: the Zotero res-eng group, the Resilience in Software Foundation at resilienceinsoftware.org, and the Allspaw playlist.

Maintenance, upgrades and licence

The last push to the default branch was on 2026-08-18, and the repository is not archived. There are no releases to upgrade between, so updating means taking the latest commits and re-reading the files that changed. The README does not describe an update procedure, and it also does not document a rollback path, so if you fork the repository to add your own notes, keep those commits on a branch rather than editing the indexes in README.md directly.

Because the content is plain Markdown, there is no migration cost and no dependency drift. The real conflict surface is README.md itself, since that is where the People and Some big ideas indexes live and where most contributions land. A local edit there will collide with upstream changes the next time you sync.

On licensing, the repository ships LICENSE.md but the metadata reports NOASSERTION, and the README does not restate the terms. Check that file before mirroring the content or reusing the annotations in your own material. Nothing in the README addresses attribution requirements beyond the inline credit to John Allspaw for the resiliencepapers.club alias and the contributor graph link.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt this repository if you need a starting point into resilience engineering literature and want the names, papers and concepts laid out before you spend money on books. Do not adopt it if you need a formal bibliography, a citation manager export, or material aimed at construction management, where the README offers nothing. Before relying on it, open intro.md for the reading order and check the LICENSE.md terms, since the repository is marked NOASSERTION and the README does not spell out reuse rights.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. lorin/resilience-engineering on GitHub
3. Project website
4. README