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There could be a business to be made in capturing and disseminating tribal knowledge for organizations. Even orgs with the best documentation don't have a great

There could be a business to be made in capturing and disseminating tribal knowledge for organizations. Even orgs with the best documentation don't have a great mechanism to capture and make available tribal knowledge which is un-authoritative, sometimes conflicting, and constantly changing. In the past I made an effort to address this by creating a unofficial but quickly searchable document repository documenting every question I have gotten from a teammate by either answering it or pointing to where the authoritative answer could be found. What I found was the following: 1. Questions are repetitive, you can quickly build a base of tribal knowledge and point people to the answer. 2. If the document tool is quick and efficient, team members will generally check it first instead of asking. 3. Sometimes document tribal knowledge conflicts with someone else's tribal knowledge. This is a great opportunity to hash out the more correct answer and update the document. 4. Tribal knowledge gets stale fast and needs constant curating. 5. The less friction to find an answer, eg fast access and fast/accurate searching, greatly increases success. NB. GPT is a perfect front end for such an effort.

wjholden 2y ago
I would have loved to train an LLM on my old technical blog. In my last job, I used a blog to write informal reports. I set pretty loose rules for the blog for my team. We would post meeting minutes, outage postmortems, scripts, tricky one-liners, general lessons learned, and so on. We used SharePoint, which is kinda meh but it works. The "Alert Me" feature in SharePoint made it easy to subscribe my teammates to the blog via email, so you got the benefits of email (push notifications) without the drawbacks (employee mailboxes are unsearchable once they leave). I believe email contributes to this tacit ("tribal") knowledge that the OP names. I think my blog went a long way to counter this effect. A major goal in our blog posts was to capture the "why" behind our decisions. Often, we fail to remember the nuances of our own decisions in hindsight. I always thought it was important to name our present priorities and known-unknowns.
worksonmymach 2y ago
Atlassian Rovo is this. The trick is to get people to get their tribal knowledge down in public Slack channels or their docs system. Recording most Zooms with AI summaries may help.
drewcoo 2y ago
If the businesses valued it, it would be documented knowledge. It's clearly not worth the time or money to document. If the workers values it, it would likely be documented knowledge. Undocumented knowledge can be job security.
- m348e912 2y ago
  > If the workers values it, it would likely be documented knowledge. Undocumented knowledge can be job security. You're mostly right. It's paradoxical in some ways. Workers generally won't go through the trouble of documenting tribal knowledge. However they greatly appreciate if someone else does.

wjholden 2y ago

I would have loved to train an LLM on my old technical blog. In my last job, I used a blog to write informal reports. I set pretty loose rules for the blog for my team. We would post meeting minutes, outage postmortems, scripts, tricky one-liners, general lessons learned, and so on. We used SharePoint, which is kinda meh but it works. The "Alert Me" feature in SharePoint made it easy to subscribe my teammates to the blog via email, so you got the benefits of email (push notifications) without the drawbacks (employee mailboxes are unsearchable once they leave). I believe email contributes to this tacit ("tribal") knowledge that the OP names. I think my blog went a long way to counter this effect. A major goal in our blog posts was to capture the "why" behind our decisions. Often, we fail to remember the nuances of our own decisions in hindsight. I always thought it was important to name our present priorities and known-unknowns.

worksonmymach 2y ago

Atlassian Rovo is this. The trick is to get people to get their tribal knowledge down in public Slack channels or their docs system. Recording most Zooms with AI summaries may help.

drewcoo 2y ago

If the businesses valued it, it would be documented knowledge. It's clearly not worth the time or money to document. If the workers values it, it would likely be documented knowledge. Undocumented knowledge can be job security.

m348e912 2y ago
> If the workers values it, it would likely be documented knowledge. Undocumented knowledge can be job security. You're mostly right. It's paradoxical in some ways. Workers generally won't go through the trouble of documenting tribal knowledge. However they greatly appreciate if someone else does.