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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

We use notion (https://www.notion.so/) but the tool itself doesn't really matter. Confluence, Notion, Basecamp, etc. We're a team of 20 people right now, and _everything_ lives in Notion. No "look at this google doc" or "go to <vendor>'s website", it lives in Notion. We can link to external vendors for "live" content, but PDFs are embedded, samples are zipped, etc.

Each page has an owner, a contact, and an expiry date. Owner is responsible for keeping it up to date, and if you see a page that is expired you can ping the owner (unfortunately we don't have "alert on expired page" yet). If the owner is unavailable, the backup should be able to answer any queries/update the page, and if they can't then the failure of that lies on the page owner. There are a few pages that have empty backups, by virtue of our company size, but all the critical stuff has an owner, backup and is checked once every month or two.

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Our team uses notion as well. We're not at the scale that you are with owned pages , expiry. How does your team feel about the effort-to-value of maintaining it? It seems rather onerous.

We tend to keep more ephemeral project management stuff in our tracker or google docs and more long-lived content in our Notion tool. I'd be curious how your team balances that.

I like these kinds of systems. I do feel like in generally they require so much buy in from everyone, maintaining these pages has to be a constant priority. This becomes a problem if multiple people leave at once or someone is very busy when expiration comes up and rubber stamps the renewal with outdated information...

But it's definitely better than no system at all!

> do feel like in generally they require so much buy in from everyone, maintaining these pages has to be a constant priority.

This is true of any system of knowledge sharing, even if it's in-person-watercooler chat. The hard part is getting people to do it, no matter what the system is.

> This becomes a problem if multiple people leave at once or someone is very busy when expiration comes up and rubber stamps the renewal with outdated information...

The only solve for multiple people leaving at once is to ensure that you have all of their knowledge documented ahead of time, and if you have that, you don't need anything like this. A tool or a process can't solve people problems. For outdated information, this is no worse than the confluence abyss that I've experienced in previous jobs.

A proper transition to those systems includes talking to each team that will be using it, breaking down all their workflows, and making sure that said system works with practices in place (a new system that causes everything to take 20% more time is not okay). It also includes maintenance plans; every bit of information planning I do also includes 'this is how you maintain this system/this is the parts that will require effort to maintain/this is what will happen if you decide not to do any maintenance whatsoever, which I do not recommend'.

Documentation management and information architecture planning is work, and properly planned your maintenance will be minimal (NOT non-existent, but minimal) because the system will be designed to be as frictionless as possible.

But nobody wants to either pay for that or accept the time it takes.

I found that Basecamp’s docs are great for documentation.

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