Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

#101

Post by jobvandervoort » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 1:58 PM UTC

clebio wrote: post #87

jobvandervoort wrote: post #13

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…

Curious whether you really mean _everyone_ -- including non-technical roles like Sales? I notice that for instance Sales seems reasonably well document [1] so, maybe so? [1]: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/resellers/

Yes, everyone == every single person employed by GitLab Inc.

Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

#102

Post by jobvandervoort » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 1:58 PM UTC

ggregoire wrote: post #96

jobvandervoort wrote: post #13

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?

Exactly. Or at least teach them to use GitLab, which is a good motivator to make the product easy to use.

Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

#103

Post by ENadyr » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 8:44 PM UTC

I literally spent the last 2 weeks looking into this. Used Confluence and a few wiki solutions before. Both in context of a tech team in a large investment banking institution, startups and community organizations. In the end it was a close call between Confluence and a new product called Slab, for my small startup but we decided to go with Slab (http://slab.com).

What I liked about Slab is the way better performance over the Confluence, quick integrations from their team (took them about 2 days to add draw.io integration on request). I liked how clean it was and easy for non-devs in my team to understand the structure.

Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

#104

Post by matt_the_bass » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 11:41 PM UTC

There have been a number of comment stating something like “the choice of tool doesn’t matter, the use of the tool and convention does”. However can anyone recommend a good tool?

We’ve been using a moin moin wiki. It’s ok, but we’d like to move to a simple, hostel solution so we don’t need to maintain a moin moin server.

We don’t need fancy, just simple with attachments, images and links.

Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

#105

Post by theknarf » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 8:36 AM UTC

bpicolo wrote: post #68

Blindedwino wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a glance, it looks like a product that's stored on the company's servers. Why would any company, startup or dinosaur, want to put their knowledge base and documentation in the hand of a new pretty and fancy product that might fold next month? There's no Linux download, no github, and especially, no server - I stay away from products like that, sorry.

> Why would any company Almost every company uses external services for this sort of thing right now. Google Drive, Confluence, whatever. Notion allows you to export to PDF/Markdown as well. https://www.notion.so/Export-to-PDF-or-markdown-5406d98f17d2...

Confluence and a lot of other products allow the company to install the product on their company server. Not on the server of some "startup". A lot of industries does not allow you to just store think on Google Drive, think any industry working with sensitive information like healthcare and the defense industry.

Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

#106

Post by znhll » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 8:57 AM UTC

k__ wrote: post #17

We used wikis, it was a nightmare. If you don't have a librarian at hand try something that forces more structure at you.

Yeah I've learned that organiztion of data seems to come back to librarians or libraries.

Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

#107

Post by PeOe » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 7:51 AM UTC

I´m the COO of Zenkit, a project management tool. But that´s not the point right now. On our Blog https://blog.zenkit.com we want to try to show people how to work effectively alone, in teams and remote. We also show how to use systems like Zenkit to organize every company level.

Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

#108

Post by wannabetechba » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 1:50 PM UTC

This is what I've studied, and taught in informal unpaid and paid settings. A presentation with audience teamwork is my favorite method.

Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

#109

Post by wannabetechba » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 5:09 PM UTC

gringoDan wrote: post #5

I'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…

> If anyone can recommend a good way to align incentives here, I'd be very interested.

My quick answer which may sound trite is compensation. An organization can compensate the author(s) either during their employment or even after. Yes, after. Award either non-voting shares. Set up a micropay system for each time a current employee "votes" the documented solution.

Documentation (and organization of documentation) is my thing. I hear so much talk and see so little progress. The most expensive work hour is the unbillable hour yet organization after organization continue with status quo of inaction.

Re: Ask HN: Organizing company knowledge?

#110

Post by injvstice » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 7:01 PM UTC

hellofunk wrote: post #63

dx034 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if the system fails on a Monday morning at 3am after 20 years without issues and needs to be fixed before the business opens. Having comments for every line helps fixing it dramatically. For most code it will be overkill but there are some companies where it's integral for core systems.

Sure but every line? You increment a loop counter, i+=1; and you say that in a comment? The best rule of thumb is, make the code so clear that it is itself a comment, and only if the code cannot relay the meaning, then add a comment.

Depending on the code, it can be freaking hard to track down what that 'i' means, especially when someone writes a coding standard (or a language) where it requires all variables to be defined at the beginning of the function instead of close to location of use.

on the other hand, if it was named something like number_of_records it would be clearer.