For me this was an oddly-timed AskHN. I am publishing a book on this exact topic in the next week or so.
Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?
21–30 of 110 posts
Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?
#22Honestly there is so much software out there I have trouble telling what is good from bad. I was amazed that some one can start and bootstrap an indie company knowledge site (https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/generating-25-000-mo-...)
since there's Confluence and Sitepoint and god knows what else (wikis are basically open source tho requires devs to integrate, you can always hack it with google drive and google docs, etc)
its honestly a market i dont understand, i'd love a high level primer on it.
Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?
#23[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?
#24Make all of your company's internal technical discussions archived and searchable forever, no matter where they happen (mailing lists, bug tracker, code review, chat, etc). That's more helpful to me than any amount of deliberately written "documentation" that instantly goes stale.
Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?
#25Recently we started using Slinkky https://www.slinkky.com . It makes organizing information for your team and company really simple. There's a 30 day trial for startups so there's no loss if it doesn't work out. You can collaborate on personal boards with coworkers and add team spaces for shared content. You can restrict permission by user so only admins and managers can add content to team boards.
Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?
#26Try https://www.notion.so ! It combines docs, wikis, and todos; it's collaborative, and it's beautifully designed. It's perfect for building knowledge bases for teams. (Disclaimer / I worked there in the past)
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Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?
#27I've found that the tool doesn't matter as much as the company culture. You need to foster a culture of documentation for EVERYTHING. It doesn't matter if you have the best tools in the world if nobody uses them. Too often this falls by the wayside because documentation of processes and preserving institutional knowledge, while extremely important, isn't the type of work that gets recognized or rewarded. If anyone ca…
This cannot be stressed enough. Often I see managers talk about Sharepoint or some wiki type tool within the company but then the culture of documentation is missing.
The best case scenario I found was in a bank. Each line of code was documented and rationale explained in plain english. This way hypothetically even a newbie could run the system.
While different places have different issues, I found that the quality of documentation was inversely proportional to people's insecurity about their job. More insecure they were about their job. More resistance to documentation was found.
Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?
#28Team drive is a gsuite feature one found handy. It has to be turned on in older gsuites as it's a newer feature but it is on automatically in newer ones.
It is good for defining structure and permissions at an org level for files and folders and solves that pesky problem of documents not being accessible if the Creator of them has their account shut down.
Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?
#29I've found that the tool doesn't matter as much as the company culture. You need to foster a culture of documentation for EVERYTHING. It doesn't matter if you have the best tools in the world if nobody uses them. Too often this falls by the wayside because documentation of processes and preserving institutional knowledge, while extremely important, isn't the type of work that gets recognized or rewarded. If anyone ca…
That is so right. In fact one of the best organization I ever lived was in a small company ( There was basically a semantic document number indicating what the document was about, which revision it was and where it was stored. Each Project/Product had an index linking to the document that was maintained by hand. This even extended to software versions where you had to publish some zipped version of your software at e…
Agreed. I've long felt that the most effective tool is good curation of the material. You can use a wiki, or folders; I've used both successfully. The most important thing is that the material is organized in a way which allows for findings things efficiently. It can work if everyone knows the rules of said curation, but I've found it works best when one or two individuals are effectively the mods. The mods set the rules (folder naming conventions, hierarchy, maybe leave a README file in the root folder, etc...). If you use a wiki, you still have "folders", and the same rules apply. Otherwise, it becomes a big ball of documentation mud.
Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?
#30I've found that the tool doesn't matter as much as the company culture. You need to foster a culture of documentation for EVERYTHING. It doesn't matter if you have the best tools in the world if nobody uses them. Too often this falls by the wayside because documentation of processes and preserving institutional knowledge, while extremely important, isn't the type of work that gets recognized or rewarded. If anyone ca…
This cannot be stressed enough. Often I see managers talk about Sharepoint or some wiki type tool within the company but then the culture of documentation is missing. The best case scenario I found was in a bank. Each line of code was documented and rationale explained in plain english. This way hypothetically even a newbie could run the system. While different places have different issues, I found that the quality o…
> Each line of code was documented
Wow. Every line.
There is such a thing as too many comments or too liberal use of comments in code.