Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

This looks really nice and quite useful, you should do a Show HN! (By the way, that first link doesn't work)

Apart from being pretty slow, I don't think Jira really sucks once a) it is configured to your needs b) you know how to use it (which should be fairly easy with a in place). Which goes for pretty much any tool more complicated than notepad, so to speak: it's not like the other similar tools out there are much better, just different, imo. Though I have the impression a lot of people who think Jira sucks might be using it where they actually don't need it because much simpler tools could suffice in their particular situation.

Another alternative is TreeSheets (http://strlen.com/treesheets/) which is desktop only but very fast and nice implementation of structured note taking tool. It's very well suited as replacement for mind maps, categorization of items and mapping hierarchical structures. I prefer it to any online solution because of speed and data ownership.

Notion: https://notion.so

[edit: I work at Notion. I’ve added some more color about that to the top here. This isn’t marketing spam I’m commenting from bed on my phone - sorry that it came off slimy]

Notion is a malleable collaborative wiki that also has relational databases.

We build Notion, so it figures that Notion is our single source of truth. I think the way we use Notion internally works pretty well - with better results than the smattering of tools I’ve used at other companies - but we’re a smaller team...

Notion makes a good wiki because adding, editing, and organizing information has such low activation energy. Each part of the org (Eng, Community, Marketing, People, ...) has a tree of pages with process, information, etc.

We have a few big centralized databases that everyone uses:

- Tasks. Lets us see what anyone is doing, assign tickets, track progress.

- Documents. This one has a weird name. All teams put meeting notes, research, proposed designs, RFCs, specs in this database. The common thread here is that documents are artifacts of their time: they’re authored, reviewed and commented on by the team, iterated on, then ratified or archived. We rarely change them afterwards because they store historical context on decisions. If an RFC changes a process, or a design gets implemented, the affected team(s) might update their wikis.

- Goals. Stores objectives, product use-cases, and large projects. We relate Tasks and Documents with the Goals they support.

Centralizing these databases fosters cross-team visibility and assists with collaboration, eg seeing Eng and Marketing tasks related to an upcoming launch, plus the designs and research.

Shortcomings:

- Search. At the ~50 person size it isn’t a desperate problem but it does hurt.

- Integration with email and calendar. There’s no way to sync Notion to Gcal or react to incoming emails.

- Integration with Github: none.

- Mobile performance could be better.

[Disclaimer: I work at Notion.]

I use Markdown documents in Git repositories whenever I can. Also try to evangelize for this at work. PRs then include relevant changes to both code and docs and it's beautiful. For personal project docs I use this exclusively. At work it depends on the team, some people don't like it, but most often it is because they don't like keeping docs at all, not because of an alternative preference. I avoid UI and WYSIWYG based systems like Confluence like plague. I personally can't stand them and every time I have to use one I do my hardest to pretend I'm writing Markdown in my head.

For personal agenda I use Apple Notes with basically just a huge list of things to do and events that are about to happen and I curate that list more or less non stop during the day. If something comes up and I'm with people and don't want to be rude and spend too much time on the phone editing things to be in the right order and have all the relevant info captured with them, I just plop a line at the top of the note knowing I'll groom it later.