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My team started using Notion last year, and this rings true: > one of the biggest pain points I have seen is people not knowing where to place new pages I hav

My team started using Notion last year, and this rings true: > one of the biggest pain points I have seen is people not knowing where to place new pages I have also seen this happen with every knowledge-base software I have ever used. A team’s knowledge-base (which represents a shared domain model) is evolving all the time, as people’s understanding of the domain evolves, and sometimes there is information that is valuable but doesn’t have an optimal home in the current domain model. The only way I’ve seen it successfully managed is by having different standards for information structure depending on how well the information’s role is understood by the org. You need dumping grounds where one can quickly jot down relevant information for later processing, and you need areas that present a more structured view of what you know to support decision-making, and a schedule for consolidating and structuring the unstructured knowledge. This creates far less pressure to put everything in the right place at first. I think of it like a write-ahead log, or like how food is dumped into the stomach before the individual nutrients are extracted and delivered to various destinations around the body - you don’t deliver each nutrient molecule to its destination before eating another.

jlokier 6y ago
> I think of it like a write-ahead log Lovely analogy. It's also how high write-throughput databases work. First write the data in a way that's optimised for getting it committed to storage and at high density. Only later, in the background, maybe at a more convenient time, is the data reorganised for finding and reading things.
noahtallen 6y ago
Interestingly, my company’s “knowledge base” doesn’t really have a structure for the most part. I can just publish a page in it and share the URL around, and most people interact with it via search. So no matter how I organize the page, people generally find it without going through some kind of hierarchy. I think this works really well when there are tons and tons of pages, and I also don’t have to be concerned about how to organize it.

jlokier 6y ago

> I think of it like a write-ahead log Lovely analogy. It's also how high write-throughput databases work. First write the data in a way that's optimised for getting it committed to storage and at high density. Only later, in the background, maybe at a more convenient time, is the data reorganised for finding and reading things.

noahtallen 6y ago

Interestingly, my company’s “knowledge base” doesn’t really have a structure for the most part. I can just publish a page in it and share the URL around, and most people interact with it via search. So no matter how I organize the page, people generally find it without going through some kind of hierarchy. I think this works really well when there are tons and tons of pages, and I also don’t have to be concerned about how to organize it.