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

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

#201

Post by geocar »

koonsolo wrote: post #48
geocar wrote: post #33

Create a knowledge-team whose sole job is to take information from all the other teams, digest it, and make it available to the rest of the firm. Call it "corporate communications" or "internal marketing" or whatever floats your boat. If you can't get a proper department, at a minimum you can get a on-staff librarian who is a good technical writer who you can pass around the firm (as long as they have the ear of the…

In a programmer environment, this is impossible. A programmer will always need to document his own things for a simple reason: (s)he is the only one who really knows. Putting people in the middle of that who can barely understand all the details, seems like a lot of overhead for a worse deliverable.

A programmer who writes their own documentation is like a barber cutting their own hair: Economical perhaps, but worse for anyone who has to look at the result.

And yes, if your audience is programmers, then ideally you can hire technical writers who can program, and who can speak to programmers, but failing that, technical writers who can get proofread by a programmer can also work.

Having a single consistent voice is what matters, and that comes from giving a person the responsibility to be that voice.

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

#204

Post by 0xCMP »

dorfsmay wrote: post #141
tombell93 wrote: post #39

I use Notion ( https://notion.so ) for pretty much everything (budgeting, tracking my PhD progress, high-level work-related projects, financial planning, etc). It's so flexible and has all the features you might reasonably want for managing information etc. It's essentially Evernote and Trello in one beautiful tool. At work we use Wikis for most things.

Can you make backups of your data that don't rely on notion to exist to be usable?

Everything can be exported, but once exported it can not be directly re-imported.

https://www.notion.so/Back-up-your-data-1a8eb5bdfce34d19a636...

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

#205

Post by 0xCMP »

We do not use Notion where I work, but if I were doing something today I'm not sure why I'd pick anything else.

Primary reasons: Pages are easily created, can easily create templates for pages (reduce friction, increase consistency), easily shared among many people, and their "databases" feature which makes structuring all those pages much easier.

e.g. Have team meetings? Create a meetings database and change the default "new page" template to one with all the required areas to cover. Add some fields in the database for the date, who is in the meeting, where it took place, or whatever else is relevant.

If you keep projects in Notion you can link between databases and to other pages within the same database to provide links to relevant projects. Looking up all meetings referring to a project is as easy as filtering for all meetings with that page.

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

#206

Post by eugenekolo2 »

0xCMP wrote: post #205

We do not use Notion where I work, but if I were doing something today I'm not sure why I'd pick anything else. Primary reasons: Pages are easily created, can easily create templates for pages (reduce friction, increase consistency), easily shared among many people, and their "databases" feature which makes structuring all those pages much easier. e.g. Have team meetings? Create a meetings database and change the def…

My issue with notion is that it doesn't support sharing PDFs/PPTs besides sharing the entire page. I'd like for it to backup my PDFs which is does onto AWS... but the links are gigantic (2k characters) and expire.

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

#208

Post by mkr-hn »

I recently switched to Notion from Evernote. Here's a referral link: https://www.notion.so/?r=a48a98c66d914566827b061a3e7efd91

It took about a week to get used to the way organization works, but the ability to nest things under things and have them more or less self-index is handy. If I move two things under the same item, the item will show a list of the two things in a new Page type item. You can turn that new page into a wiki, style it, add notes, etc.

If you've ever used Scrivener, Notion is similar to the way it lets you organize things in a freeform way. My only gripe is that export dumps everything into files in one folder. They need to copy the way Dropbox Paper (or Scrivener) exports that retains the structure in folders. At least they support Markdown exports. That's more useful than the full HTML pages most note apps export.

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

#210

Post by madhadron »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #138

I 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…

> 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 Skype chats (which the company won't allow history for).

Sadly, a tool isn't going to get you out of this. You will end up with all the files uploaded to a wiki or repository. One would hope that seeing all the chaos in one place would make everyone say, "Oh, maybe we need to change how we do this," but that is unlikely. What will probably happen is, "This new knowledge management system is a chaotic mess. Let's abandon it."

I would completely ignore tools when you start on your plan. This is going to be a slog about setting expectations for how things will be decided, documented, and referenced, about getting managers and tech leads onboard to discipline their groups, and about having the whole thing not collapse into a bureaucratic nightmare.

Since you're shipping software, I might start with articulating the kinds of documents groups are expected to produce and keep up to date such as design documents that include why particular decisions were made, reference docs and docstrings to let users of a system find what they need, and tutorials/introductions to get users up to speed. Then expectations about how things should be recorded (in an expected class of document, not buried in a PowerPoint, and non-trivial examples).

Then you need buy in from management that engineers should put cycles towards this, and technical writing support to keep the whole think functioning. But think about behavior, not tools. User stories, if you will, of what kind of information people look for and when, and what kind of information people produce.

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