
Ask HN: Referencing documents and emails in a knowledge base? - tin7in
In my team we frequently copy and paste information from Google Docs, Jira and Slack to our knowledge base in order to make it searchable and reference it in other documents. We would often copy snippets of text, add a link to the source and a timestamp. We tried switching to Notion but it didn&#x27;t allow us to reference external documents and it&#x27;s too generic for issue tracking.<p>Is there a better way to do that? We are doing that mainly for meeting notes, important technical conversations on Slack or when receiving feedback about something we are working on.
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Jugurtha
We use GitLab. We push markdown meeting minutes[^1] with a template to a
repository, which makes them easy to parse.

We use wiki and issues to document everything. We put links to Slack
conversations and quote messages of decisions or plan of action.

We also use GitLab for our paperwork (financial, taxes, etc) in a checklist.

We have an Operator's Manual handbook that tells how to somehow run the
company (all the things that took us time and experimenting to learn, whether
how to make an invoice and the laws relative to which information should be
present, to where to pay taxes with GPS location and a picture of the building
you need to go, which story and office, and what to put in the cheque). These
were born after we've had trouble sending an invalid invoice.

Conversations with new hires lead to writing an onboarding document that cites
the books to read, why we consider they're good, and why they're useful. How
we work (issues, merge/pull requests/commit messages). This was born also by
being confused when a ne hire came before we had their email and accounts set
up or making the same remarks on code, etc. Early version here[^2].

Hopefully I can disappear and someone could eventually have an easier time
stepping in.

Doing this, one of our core contributors who was unavailable for a year has
been able to stay informed on where we're going because they're cc'd in issues
and we strive to be clear in technical exchanges.

[^1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19924100](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19924100)

[^2]:
[https://jhadjar.gitlab.io/kbase/hiring/](https://jhadjar.gitlab.io/kbase/hiring/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21808439](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21808439)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598632](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598632)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21427886](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21427886)

