
Ask HN: How to achieve and maintain a healthy organizational knowledge base? - torvald
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&#x27;s doors and power points slides hidden away in an email thread. All thoughts and rants are welcome!
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mindcrime
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quickly become full of outdated and irrelevant content, and become a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.

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probably_wrong
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.

~~~
mindcrime
_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.

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brudgers
_that otherwise would be people knocking on each other 's doors_

That's the best method.

