Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 304 posts

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

#251

Post by edickstein »

Knowledge Management is clearly a ubiquitous and important business problem. I've struggled with Knowledge Management in previous roles and deployed a tool called Guru at two different companies. My teams found Guru significantly better than a Wiki because Guru distributes the maintenance load across a team of Authors (experts) and sets verification intervals (ie 1 week, 1 month, 1 year, etc) so that the Author is nudged to re-verify or update the info after the horizon expires. We found such success with the tool, and I enjoyed working with the Guru team on deployment so much, that (full disclosure!!) I now work on Guru's Customer Success team.

There was mention in the thread below about no tool being able to replace personal interaction. While I agree with that, Guru is the next best thing I've found so far, especially when teams grow to the point that the "Expert" is getting shoulder-tapped too often to focus on their actual job. Tons of other good ideas below that I don't have time to consume.

Check out getguru.com if curious!

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

#253

Post by stoolpigeon »

masnick wrote: post #244
stoolpigeon wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's not too much to ask, I would add on here that I'd like to see your Hugo setup. I've been learning it recently but the examples I find are all rather simple. Just seeing what you've done gives me some ideas of how you did it, and I'll work on figuring it out - but information on how you organize things before hugo generates the site would be greatly appreciated.

Unfortunately I don't have a good way to reveal the source of my site as there are some things in that git repo that can't be made public. I too have struggled to find examples of doing more complex things in Hugo. It's such a versatile tool that it's probably pretty hard to document everything in an approachable way. I may write up how I set up the Hugo portion of the knowledge base as it has worked quite well. If I…

I understand. I'll subscribe - and just looking over the parts of the site and going back to the documentation has helped me to wrap my head around a few things that were eluding me.

Thanks for the response, I appreciate it and I'm really glad you took the time to post your original answer. It's a real help to me in ways I didn't expect when I clicked into this thread.

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

#254

Post by Jeff_Brown »

iamwil wrote: post #249
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am impressed. Whenever I try to build a tree of thoughts, I run into the problem that I want things to fall under multiple categories. I might start by classifying them according to subject area (as you have done), but then I might want a collection of those notes to also fall under "could help with project X" or "would be of interest to person Y" or "can be learned from reference Z" or any number of things.

This is what links were originally invented for.

Links are fragile and one-sided. You might move the destination. You might edit the title of the destination and want that to show up in the link text. You might want the content, not just the title, to be visible (preferably foldable) from where the link is. You might want to be able to see from the destination what links to it.

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

#255

Post by Jeff_Brown »

rubicon33 wrote: post #217
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am impressed. Whenever I try to build a tree of thoughts, I run into the problem that I want things to fall under multiple categories. I might start by classifying them according to subject area (as you have done), but then I might want a collection of those notes to also fall under "could help with project X" or "would be of interest to person Y" or "can be learned from reference Z" or any number of things.

Isn't that what tags are for? Search by tag?

I don't know. Can you point at an implementation you like?

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

#256

Post by benhurmarcel »

tvanantwerp wrote: post #161

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.)

In my team (also non-programmers) we're going for Google Docs in a folder structure. It's straightforward enough for most people and has all essential features. And my company went for G Suite so that fits well.

I just wished Google had a tool (or view in Docs) to make a note rather than a letter-type document. More like Dropbox Paper, less like Word. At least to get rid of the paper width and page separation.

For companies going for Office 365, Onenote is probably the best choice.

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

#258

Post by koonsolo »

geocar wrote: post #201
koonsolo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A programmer writing documentation is far from economical, since most of the time their time is worth more than technical writers.

It depends on the type of documentation of course, but if you work in a 50 person team and you want to document internal architecture or code structure, you better let the programmer that knows about the stuff write it.

First getting that technical writer up to speed about how everything is structured, the little implications etc, is pretty insane. It's like that phone game where you tell one person something, and then that one tells the next.

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

#259

Post by emilsoman »

I have a directory named “mystuff” that’s gitignored globally, in every repository I work on. This is where I store commands, snippets, scripts, ideas, meeting notes etc. To organize things I find on the web, I simply use bookmark folders in the browser.

In our company we use both github wiki and google drive to share knowledge.

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

#260

Post by YohAsakura »

What a cool thread, I mean it.

I don't know how to organize wiki-like things for teams, but here are my two cents for the topic of personal knowledge bases.

First of all, regardless of software, I prefer less structured and less constrained approaches so that it doesn’t take too much time and effort to add things to my knowledge base. I try to minimize the total number of entities (lists, files, notes) and to avoid folders at all. Usually I achieve this by using tags.

Secondly, I am still in a search of a perfect approach, but here is one thing where I succeeded to some extent, namely collections of homogeneous items. I use AirTable for that, but one can use Notion. For example, here is a list of software, I started it several months ago: https://airtable.com/shr8Wd96FurJmiTLs/tbl0n17xFuXrs0kMS?blo... I have a similar list for scientific papers that I read. And I started two more lists for other things. It is important that 1) the number of lists is low (I have 4 now) 2) the lists have simple structure 3) I can always download them as csv and do whatever I want.

As for the rest, I use markdown notes (I edit them with https://typora.io) stored in a dropbox-like cloud for ideas-like stuff. I use Google Keep for super-simple lists and I also have there a temporary note that serves as a buffer for sudden thoughts and ideas, from where I move them later to more appropriate place. I use https://todoist.com for my tasks, they are not organized very well (because no tags in the free plan), but the app is really nice and the number of tasks is not that great, so for now this works fine :)

Post reply on HN