For a long time, I’ve been using outliner/tree based notes software to track important things to do with me. My personal knowledge base. Some of the great outliner software I’ve used over the years include NoteKeeper, MyBase and most recently the open source application, The Guide.
However, each time I started a notes database, or switched applications, I would eventually get to a point where, things got messy. It’s hard to describe but exactly but basically I couldn’t link information properly. So bits of information related to a single topic were scattered throughout the hierarchical structure of the notes. For example, I might have a note about article ideas for this site, but in another note in a different tree-branch-leaf I might have something about redesigning the site. They are all related pieces of information, it was, well just hard to put all the pieces together.
Then it struck me, the tool (a hierarchical tree based outliner) just wasn’t the right one for the job. What I really needed was, well a wiki! I should really have caught on to this much earlier seeing as a run and promote a semi-successful public wiki, but anyway, I managed to get there in the end.
There are two particularly useful features of any wiki:
- They are designed to link topics and related pieces of information together
- They are based on the concept of growing knowledge.
By growing knowledge, I mean that you don’t have to start with anything more than one piece of information – one article to begin a wiki. They can grow infinitely from that point (think Wikipedia). So there’s no barrier to entry. Just start, with anything, and add to it over time. The perfect knowledge base solution.
Which leads me into …
<rant>
The fact that this simple idea of growing knowledge goes completely against the traditional corporate knowledge base mentality. First because it is too simple, and second because for some reason, managers around the world decree that you need to have fully documented everything before you put anything into a knowledge base, and that the knowledge base must be perfectly structured and ordered with strict rules. Guess, what, that doesn’t work! And, think about it, what is the biggest thing that stops people documenting? It’s the cost of doing it. If it takes an hour to format a few paragraphs into the proper structure using a complicated template, followed by sheer frustration finding the correct location to put it and ensuring it meets the corporate policy, you don’t end up with a good knowledge base you end up with an empty one. Because if you’re anything like me, you quickly think, way too hard, screw that…
</rant>
Anyway, coming back to using a wiki, the tool I am using is Wikidpad, which is a great, portable, open source wiki application that creates wiki pages as flat files. It even has a hierarchical/tree based view, but that defeats the purpose of what I am saying. The think I like so much about it is, you just start creating wiki pages as you see fit, and everything just works out. The linkages start appearing and your information is where you expect it to be.
So if you aren’t already using some sort of personal knowledge base tool, start. If you are using something, perhaps it isn’t meeting your needs, in which case a wiki might be the solution. As for work, perhaps that elusive quest for a knowledge base might be met by simply starting a wiki for your team, department or organisation? Remember, there is no silver bullet for knowledge management, but there are plenty of ways to stop people from ever writing anything down.
