Ask HN: How to achieve and maintain a healthy organizational knowledge base? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to achieve and maintain a healthy organizational knowledge base?

4 pointstorvald4 comments

Like a wiki where people put in their high level overviews, makings it the primary source of truth, incentivize contributions and ownership. Not necessarily just for code documentation and tech culture, but a place for the organization to collect their principles and values, long term plans and strategy documents, office tips and tricks, tutorials and guides that otherwise would be people knocking on each other's doors and power points slides hidden away in an email thread. All thoughts and rants are welcome!

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This isn't really something you can answer in a HN post. It would literally take writing a book. Or two. Or more. And there have, in fact, been many books (and journal articles, etc.) written on all of this. I have a "reading list" on this topic lying around here somewhere... actually, I thought I'd posted it to HN in the past, but I can't find it here. If I can scare up the list, I'll share it.

That said, I'll say that while technological tools are useful and important, making this kind of thing work is less about technology and more about people, culture, incentives, etc. What do I mean by that? I'm talking about things like, the way people in a given firm may be perversely incentivized to not share knowledge and help groom a central KB, because their current state of being the sole possessor of some bit of knowledge gives them (power|influence|job security|etc). And the way people exchanging knowledge in a firm are basically engaging in a sort of market exchange, where market dynamics apply. People "trade" with people they trust, and they engage in heuristics like satisficing, and favoring availability over veracity, etc.

So yeah, you can throw up an instance of MediaWiki pretty easily. And I do encourage it, as I am a fan of wiki's, even though they have issues (they quickly become full of outdated and irrelevant content, and become a disorganized clusterfuck without a lot of continual grooming), but don't expect having a wiki (or Sharepoint, or Alfresco, or $whatever) to be a cure-all.

I have yet to work in an organization with a healthy KB, but based on my best experiences:

I think that which technology to use (wiki, shared drive, etc) is not as important as the fact that there should be one AND ONLY ONE place where documentation lives. This is one of the reasons why I hate MS Teams: because every channel has its own Wiki plus its own Files, meaning that I have to hunt through every even-remotely-relevant channel and through several tabs before I find something I know exists. The same goes for chat - once half your team uses Slack and the other half prefers Skype, notifications will get lost.

Second, I think it's a good idea to have someone whose official job includes nagging other people about updating documentation rather than waiting for everyone to do it by themselves. I was in charge of keeping a log of weekly research meetings, and the simple act of writing

   March 25: Presentation by Rudolf (Paper: ?? - Slides: ??)

on the designated wiki was a great mechanism for getting Rudolf to upload their slides.

I think that which technology to use (wiki, shared drive, etc) is not as important as the fact that there should be one AND ONLY ONE place where documentation lives.

Yeah, having to jump around across many repositories is one of the big (technological) impediments to knowledge management working well. But in most companies you'll never manage to get down to just one repository. I believe the key is to have a really good search engine that indexes across all those disparate repositories and allows one to find relevant content regardless of where it's stored. That, of course, is not an easy problem to solve.

that otherwise would be people knocking on each other's doors

That's the best method.

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