Improve knowledge sharing in your organization- Part II: Internal blog

I notice that we always take notes as we learn. Gradually we start to build our second brain, a reference sheet that we can go back and refer to when we need it. However, we usually keep them in private.

We have, let say, 30 or more than 100 people in our organization
What if each of us publishes only 10% of our notes. 🔥 It's cooool

🐨 I am talking about building an internal blog for an organization.

One way to lower the bar is not to call it a blog. (tip from Stephan when we discussed this topic on a Discord channel) 😊

I also notice that people are afraid of the term Blog (too serious). So I will call it a Note system. We write down some notes every day, just try to put them in one place and share it with others.

Benefits

1. All knowledge in one place

Note system is an excellent way to store knowledge that can be searched and referred to for new employees and all people. So, for example, if someone asks a question on Slack that we already had an answer, we can refer them to the right post. No need to do the same homework again.

People can also actively search for materials that they want to learn. It is easy to learn across competencies too. For example, as a developer, I can see what people are doing in the SEO or Design team.

We don't need to worry about who should maintain the materials like we do if we use a Wiki page or Google docs since people own their posts and will maintain their posts by themselves.

2. Create a sharing culture

As I mentioned before, we all take notes for ourselves all the time. We already had the materials. Therefore, publishing part of our notes is not so difficult to do (compared to giving a talk in front of many people).

Since this is for internal, we can write in an informal style or just share our notes we already had. Feel free to express different ideas.

If we see others share their knowledge, we naturally want to contribute too.

We can easily share some notes while others can improve or build upon them.

3. Sharing is the best way of learning

You can learn in public. Sharing is a good way of receive feedbacks. I tested this idea before. About a month ago, I presented "10 tips to improve readability in JavaScript" to a small group of devs. After that, I quickly converted my talk into a small blog.

I received tons of feedback as people expressed their ideas in the comment section. Some colleagues sent me Slack messages and suggested how I can improve the post. One created a PR to fix some mistakes that I made.

Suddenly I feel surrounded by love, and it gives me a sense of being part of the team. It motivates me to contribute more.

Besides that, you can also solidify what you learn.

4. We can see what others are doing

By observing other's posts, we can know what topic they are interested in. Therefore, it connects people with the same interest. We can learn lessons that people had in different projects.

The marketing team could also ask people to combine their posts into a blog to share them publicly. It shows our clients that we know our stuff.

Q&A.

1. Everyone knows everything I know.

Everything I know has already been taught a dozen times over?
What if someone already noted what I want to share?

👉 "No matter how experienced or inexperienced you feel, you have something to share with someone".

👉 "We each have our unique approaches that can reach different people in different ways." Your experience is just unique. Keep sharing.

2. What can I share?

We work on different stacks. How can I share something that other want?

👉 Whenever you learn a new thing or solve a problem, you have good things to share. If you struggled with something, there is a good chance that others may work with it too. Share what you've struggled with

👉 Just share sth you learn/know. In this way, you have something for yourself to refer back to when you need it. If it is relevant to someone, it's a bonus.

👉 Whatever your thing is, make the thing you wish you had found when you were learning

👉 Everyone can see your interest at least