Comment by andyjohnson0
2 days ago
> How do people keep track of organizational knowledge?
In my experience:
1. Well meaning people try to build wikis/confluences/whatever that turn into backwaters of slowly rotting stuff
2. Beyond a certain extent that they can hold in their heads, most other people give up.
3. Some people hoard knowledge and use it for personal advantage.
I dont know what the solution is. Maybe an ai that reads every chat and email and commit - and builds some kind of browsable, queryable, executable knowledge trove.
I’ve started hoarding knowledge, but not for personal advantage. There were two trends that led to it.
1. People would go in and “clean up” what they thought was a rotting Confluence. They were new-ish to the company and didn’t have the knowledge or experience to know what they were looking at. Rather than ask, they just deleted stuff. Some of those things they deleted were docs I wrote, several over 20 pages long that I referenced regularly… gone.
2. Constant re-orgs and tool changes meant it was becoming difficult to know where anything goes. Not long ago I had 4 bosses in 4 years. I got tired of starting over and shuffling things around.
If I keep what I need, no one else is going to delete it without consulting me, and I don’t have to try and migrate and re-organize it every time I get a new boss or management decides we’re using a new system.
I guess a third thing, which is less of a trend, is friction. The collaboration platforms are much higher friction than something like a local Obsidian vault.
I’ve probably written and shared more documentation than everyone else on my team combined, but at some point, I got tired of the uphill battle. I still do write and share stuff I think will benefit the team, but I no longer try and make everything public for the reasons listed. If someone asks for something I have, I will always send it over, and having my notes in markdown now makes that easy.
Do you think having an AI do that is 1) possible and 2) people will like that? Seems really invasive, no?
Its possible - teams chats where I work can have ai transcription enabled, for example.
As to whether people like it: I was thinking of a work context, where expectations of privacy are lower. I guess it could be an opt-in for group chats.
Going into all chats is a horrible idea. Some chats between small groups are meant to stay that way.
I agree, not all chats. But it could be an opt-in for group chats.