The Challenges of Organizing Knowledge
Last month I was at a conference for a bunch of volunteer-run organizations. One big topic was the difficulty in retaining and organizing the internal tribal knowledge that has grown with the individual groups over time.
I offered the opinion at the time that doing so was largely impossible. Not because the technology or organizational systems don't exist, but because people are people. I didn't explain it well at the time, but I've since come up with a parable. Here we go.
Imagine a bookcase. For fun, let's say it's a Billy and you've purchased one. You have no reason to consider formal organizational systems; all you have is a bookcase. So you buy a book, read it, and put it on the left side of the top shelf. You read a second book and put it next to the first. As you acquire books, you proceed across the top shelf from left to right. Once you fill the first shelf, you start on the second shelf, and so on.
Around the middle of the fourth shelf down, you realize you just finished the sequel to the very first book you read, up there on the top shelf. But hey, you know where that previous book is, so whatever. The sequel lands in the middle of the fourth shelf and you move on.
Time passes, you fill the first bookcase, buy a second, and then fill that one. Okay, now this is all a jumble. It's time to actually organize your collection. But how?
Well, alphabetical by title seems to make sense, so let's do that. You pull all the books off the shelves and reorganize them by title. Success! No, wait... You have books by the same author scattered through all twelve shelves of your two bookcases!
So, let's go by author, then by title. Okay, that's a little better. But, wait! Now the books are out of order for the timelines within the stories! And what about authors who have multiple story worlds?[1]
So, how do we organize these bookshelves? It's impossible! You'll have to just pick something and them make it work, I guess... I mean, authors and titles, right? You can come up with something reasonably close to understandable by strangers, right?
And then, you learn about @keplercryptids who arranged their books by height and spine color. That makes perfect sense! Pulp paperback size, trade paperback size, hardback size, it's fine! What's the color on the spine? Oh, that one! I know exactly the book you mean....
So, why is knowledge organization and management so hard? Because people are hard. Different people think differently, and however much standardization we aim for, we're never going to cover all the cases. The best I can come up with is that these volunteer-run organizations need to find a volunteer who is willing to be their dedicated knowledge manager. I think a trained Librarian or someone with a Technical Documentation background would be best. But, they're still a volunteer and sometimes all you can do is the best you can do.
[1]: Let's not even get into Steven Brust, with 16 of the planned 19 novels in his main Dragaera series that could be sorted in alphabetical order, publication order, or internal chronological order, with different outcomes in each case. Not to mention the five-book Dragaeran offshoot series modeled on The Three Musketeers, the stand-alone novel modeled on The Count of Monte Cristo, or the standalone novel that has nothing in common with any other characters or locations but still takes place on the same world. ↩︎
