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Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

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Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

#91
I'll rant a bit on the topic:

Starting out can be tough. Experience and observe the company/department/team you are seeking to organize and structure the knowledge for.

* Do they care about capturing, authoring, presenting and maintaining knowledge? How much do they care?

* Enough to insert steps into their existing processes or create new ones?

If so, you have a chance. Otherwise, focus on organizing and structuring YOUR OWN company knowledge. When others look over your shoulder at a meeting, read your notes, your reports, your guides, you may be able to entice.

Examples speak louder than words.

Tooling can be tough. If you work in a small outfit, you can likely spin up the best KM tools available. If you work for a dinosaur, good luck. They are likely already entrenched with some sharepoint mess that busily employs 10's if not 100's of people. Bringing your "new tool" to the IT department will get you the run around. (I've been trying to implement Gitbook (my fav KM tool) for over 1.5 yrs.).

Large companies may also have problems with cloud deployments. And honestly, in light of data breaches, etc, I get it. Many tools (most of the ones in this Ask HN) are cloud-based so this may limit your options.

I'm currently using OneNote to author and present ~300 pages of docs to ~3000 users. Being the SOLE author, this is fine. The style and structure are consistent, but I don't like it. OneNote doesn't support markdown (are you serious Microsoft?!? you don't have an f'ing markdown editor yet?), locks you up in a proprietary format, etc. etc.

Its also too "willy nilly". Its meant as more of a personal KM tool rather than a something for general consumption.

Where I lean:

* Static site generator under git version control

* Hook up with your local "Write the Docs" Meetup

* Check out the annual "Write the Docs" conference (coming up in a few weeks in Portland!)

* And start with YOUR OWN company knowledge.

Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

#92
This is exactly what we built Topicbox for!

https://www.topicbox.com/

Because large amounts of knowledge are locked away in individual emails, having a central storage repository with good search and easy control over the flood of information makes it possible to find the knowledge in-context later.

Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a summary for it?

Build the right thing. We spend so much time and effort on building-things-right. It's much more important to build the right thing. Usually (not always) boils down to information flow and feedback loops. I'm so far in the weeds right now with the book publish date coming up it's for me to provide a good overview. Here are some comments from my alpha reader group (I do not know these people and they are not paid in a…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

#94
One thing that I've found to be helpful is to write automation scripts for core business processes. In particular scripts using the python library Fabric3 ends up very readable. It's like runnable docs...

How was machine X configured? --> read the setup script.

How do I import the CSV data from server Y? --> check the steps in the script.

How do I add a new user to system Z? --> check the steps in the script.

Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

#95
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only for the sake of emphasizing your point, I have seen companies go out of business only because they did not follow proper documentation procedures.

Whats funny, is you must also be careful what you document as it becomes discoverable. Even procedures, especially when they are safety sensitive, involve the public, or anything sorbanes.

That's a nice suggestion, but I don't get what is meant by "sorbanes"? Are you referring to Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002?

Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

#96

Ours is here: about.gitlab.com/handbook - it's open source: gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/ My tips: 1. Maintain a clear single source of truth 2. Make sure everyone can contribute to it. We do this by requiring at least to edits to the handbook during onboarding 3. Embrace it as an organisation: if not everyone is committed to it, it's hard to maintain it as truth 4. Constantly iterate and improve it. Structur…

wow that's great. How do non technical people can update it? Do you teach them Git?

Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

#97
post #50

At Airbnb we built and open sourced our own solution for this called KnowledgeRepo. You can find it here: https://github.com/airbnb/knowledge-repo it is used throughout the data org and has been extremely popular and useful. there is a blog post here with more information: https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/scaling-knowledge-at-a...

I really like Knowledge Repo but I'm not sure it solves the same problem. It seems more like an internal publishing system for results from data science not a way to document and share arbitrary company knowledge. Have I misunderstood the project?

Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

#98
I set up an OpenGoo (now FengOffice) instance internally where I work many years ago. We use it to store Notes, categorized in Projects and Subprojects. The interface makes it easy enough for non-technical people to use it and search works well enough. There are also custom fields we've added to Notes, to make up checkboxes and dropdowns.

It's still our main point of truth for a lot of processes and details, though we've been considering moving to Phabricator which we're using for our code.

Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

#99
Confluence at my last job, it was a mess. If folks don't make an effort to keep documentation up to date & organized I doubt the tool used matters much. Finally find the stage db fqdn for that one app, but turns out it was moved twice in the year since the documentation was updated? Good times!

Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

#100
Collaborative learning is a situation in which two or more people learn or attempt to learn something together. Unlike individual learning, people engaged in collaborative learning capitalize on one another's resources and skills (asking one another for information, evaluating one another's ideas, monitoring one another's work, etc.). More specifically, collaborative learning is based on the model that knowledge can be created within a population where members actively interact by sharing experiences and take on asymmetry roles. https://www.besanttechnologies.com/training-courses/data-war...
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