
Ask HN: How do you successfully deal with sharing information internally? - volkk
No matter where I have worked so far, I have not found any company that has a really good knowledge database whether it&#x27;s in the form of text, or even spoken word.<p>Complicated products have many facets and no one person can know or remember everything. We use confluence at my current company, and even if somebody writes a document detailing a process or something unknown, they&#x27;ll receive their pat on the back from coworkers, but that document will never be opened again. And the same questions will be asked, regardless.<p>Has anybody solved this yet? Is it a tooling issue? Is it cultural? Process oriented?
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adrianpike
IMHO this fail is cultural, but fixable, and is a similar symptom to feature
creep or platform sprawl - people gravitate more towards creation than
curation, and so you wind up with celebration of "adding more documentation",
ignoring whether or not the doxs are relevant or valuable.

It's similar to some of the traps I see burgeoning PM's fall into, where
they're moving things around, following or building a process, and the feeling
of work makes them feel like they're getting things done, but they're really
just doing something with low value for time like printing out JIRA tickets to
put on a whiteboard or copying the `README.md` over to Confluence.

A few culture hacks I've seen success with over the years;

\- Move private questions into a public space, and have someone pay attention
to them. When the same thing gets asked a few times, don't just add the answer
to the docs, but look at why the context isn't apparent and the question keeps
getting asked. Fix that instead of answering the question.

\- Aggressively mark deprecated docs. Make this easy process-wise. In one case
we just tagged a wiki page with a tag that changed the whole styling to make
it really visually apparent that it might be wrong.

\- Foster a culture of cutting - this usually has to happen top-down, but once
you get this baked in, it has compounding benefit across the place. Cut
features, cut code, cut documentation.

