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amabe_dev
amabe_dev

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How do you promote knowledge sharing?

Knowledge sharing seem to be a hard challenge.

So, here is the question: How do you promote knowledge sharing inside your team and/or organization?

Please share your awesome tips and resources to go deeper on the subject!

Top comments (5)

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mykezero profile image
Mykezero • Edited

Tough one, being the person who wants to acquire the knowledge, you can use these methods:

  1. Take the next maintenance task for any system you do not know:

    • A small ticket is your way into understanding at least the entry point of a system.
  2. Pair program with someone who does know the system:

    • You drive and let them steer you into solving the problem or implementing the system.
  3. Ask your teammates / manager about the system:

    • They will probably give you an overview and show you the essential parts of the program / system / interaction points.
  4. Play with the code and see what happens:

  • Make sure the author has taken into consideration that production resources should be disabled by default; no one wants DEV emails going to customers..

Now, as the person who has the knowledge:

  1. Write tests for your team:

    • Free documentation along with making sure the system works!
  2. Create a wiki and put important processes there.

    • I usually use a markdown editor like Ghosterwriter and using Pandoc to convert the markdown to whatever format is needed.
  3. Be willing to share the knowledge and share multiple times if you must:

    • As a team member, it's your job to empower your teammates. Plus, you may need them to know if you ever want to go on vacation!!
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amabe_dev profile image
amabe_dev

If anybody read this comment, I highly recommend reading the article. It is very well written and makes a lot of good points.

The same link but bigger. Because it deserve to take some place here in the comments.

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amabe_dev profile image
amabe_dev

An idea that I found interesting lately is taking notes as a team.

The idea is to have a low friction process for the team to take notes and share them with others.

I found this article from @cassidoo really interesting on the subject (it is from this article that I learned about the idea):

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amabe_dev profile image
amabe_dev

First of all, I think that we should try to provide an environment as safe as possible for anybody to share.

I think that people will not share their knowledge if they fear being judged or if they are in a very competitive environment where their knowledge is their edge over the others.

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rcls profile image
OssiDev • Edited

Communities of practice.