My office of mostly non-programmers is looking for a knowledge base solution. A lot of these recommendations seem geared toward developers. I'm curious what user-friendly, dead-simple products are available. (Note: markdown files in a git repo only meets these criteria for people like me, not for my coworkers.)
Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?
161–170 of 304 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?
#162I work in a team closely related to another team, and together we're about 30 people in the midst of THOUSANDS of engineers responsible for shipping product. We are dying under the burden of tracking and correlating engineering decisions across product lines and customers through presentations (you can't have a meeting without PowerPoint!) and spreadsheets -- scattered all over internal shared drives -- email, and Sk…
Wouldn't a self hosted Wiki or Gitlab instance using markdown files be better than a homegrown solution?
How could that incorporate the endless PowerPoint files that, unfortunately, contain critical details about design specs? Cut that content out, and put it in MD, after the meetings? An import process that does this for us? I'm not saying it's a good system, but this is the corporate culture. The vast majority of our design history is only codified in PowerPoint. We have a PTC Integrity system, but it's so slow and so bloated, people avoid it at all costs.
Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?
#163TiddlyWiki: https://tiddlywiki.com/
I used it for a while and really enjoyed. But I wanted to make it work with github pages and it did not seem easy. Has anyone here managed to do that?
https://tiddlywiki.com/#Saving%20to%20a%20Git%20service
Does this help?
Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?
#164You must try what's better for your team. Decide in subteams and share with the others the experience on workshops, then evaluate the pros and cons to decide and don't be afraid of try and change. The right set of tools also depends on the type of work you do.
Blogs, wikis and QA sites (also microblogging, shared conversations) witch a search center for all are classic instruments for implementing solutions that start by the organization (with agreement) of the "way of doing" by the teams and management. UPDATE: Like others say no replacement but a complement of teams and people face to face interactions, that can be perfectly established with some sort of SCRUM scalation.
On dev and DevOps environments, I prefer "doc as code" solutions (Github based); with one type of Github project as Hub for a collection of subprojects, using the main repo as documentation for guide, FAQ, status and blog post host (markdown or variants) as well as the Project Management and Issues management features as coordination tools.
Please elaborate on the kind of work and teams, the real need for integration with existent information management systems and the community will come with better suggestions. There is a lot of tools available, including more general approaches like a CMS portal with Sharepoint or O365 or Wordpress with plugins, some more direct to the KNB question only like QA for teams (StackOverflow), others tasks focused like Trello, etc.
Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?
#165I hold office hours: Two meetings a week with (usually) no agenda, and anyone can call in and ask anything.
Sometimes someone will email me the day before and suggest an agenda.
Other times, when there are newcomers, I'll set an agenda for a few meetings. Usually I discuss design patterns that we use, libraries that we use, ect.
Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?
#166I have a personal "knowledge base" that is publicly available at https://maxmasnick.com/kb/ . This is partially inspired by Chris Albon's excellent data science technical notes: http://chrisalbon.com . I find it very helpful to have this kind of information on a public website. It's easy to search myself, quick to edit[^1], and helpful for sharing with others when someone asks me a question. For notes I don't want to…
Good to see a UMB alum here. Who uses Tachyons no less! Thanks for the tips.
Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?
#167Personal organization: (1) Use the Windows file system to create a directory ("folder") tree that is often a taxonomic hierarchy . Have some good little command line tree walking commands. (2) Do a lot with just text in simple text files. Generally prefer just simple text. Manage these files with a really good text editor. Have a lot of macros for the editor. E.g., start each entry in a file with a time, date, day of…
Awesome, thanks
Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't a self hosted Wiki or Gitlab instance using markdown files be better than a homegrown solution?
How could that incorporate the endless PowerPoint files that, unfortunately, contain critical details about design specs? Cut that content out, and put it in MD, after the meetings? An import process that does this for us? I'm not saying it's a good system, but this is the corporate culture. The vast majority of our design history is only codified in PowerPoint. We have a PTC Integrity system, but it's so slow and so…
Well Wiki's support file uploading and you can always source control the ppt files and use MD files where appropriate.
Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?
#169I work in a team closely related to another team, and together we're about 30 people in the midst of THOUSANDS of engineers responsible for shipping product. We are dying under the burden of tracking and correlating engineering decisions across product lines and customers through presentations (you can't have a meeting without PowerPoint!) and spreadsheets -- scattered all over internal shared drives -- email, and Sk…
I've worked at several multi-billion dollar corporations. Here's what was used, to varying degrees of success:
Private owned retailer: used Sharepoint and / or word documents on a shared network drive. This didn't work very well, but it ticked the "I did it" / corporate compliance boxes.
University: we use OneNote notebooks for each team. It's stored on a file share, and since everyone already uses Windows 10 / O365, it's an easy thing for our security concerns. It's also auto-backed up to the cloud (O365). It's also easy for business users / BA's to view and contribute to. Downsides: it's hard to flag info as out of date, or notify people of changes.
Healthcare provider: we used Markdown / Git. This worked because there was a single (mono) git solution for the entire org. Technically there was an SVN thing too, but the org was working to actively remove that / transfer source code to BitBucket. We required each project to have a README.md. This file included what the project did, and all the info a new analyst needs to know to get up and running: how to build the project, what servers it deployed to, what testing / production URL's applied to the project, what tools you installed on your local machine, etc.
We had a separate repository for "standards" that applied to all projects or across different global teams (think "internal" - EPIC, Sharepoint, etc teams and "external" product teams). These were just markdown files that contained policy info, best practices, libraries to use, etc. There was a "standards" team made up of a dozen individuals from separate teams that met quarterly to make updates to these standards. Changes were managed in Git and any issues were created there as well. It worked pretty well, since policy / standard changes tend to move slowly in large orgs. It also gave all teams visibility to the policies so they were all on the same page.
Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?
#170For me knowledge sharing is about first having ideas captured in a suitable form. I have been using mindmapping software and find them amazingly useful in team meetings. No more powerpoint agony. Meetings go very smooth. Everybody sees the context visually when a mindmap is used for capturing the whole meeting interactively. Sharing them is easy as well. Just export to pdf and send after the meeting.