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by safetythirds 1453 days ago
At my place of work, our internal chat rooms (not Slack, but a similar product) are automatically wiped of messages older than two weeks, to actively discourage anyone from using it as a knowledge store.

Instead, we have a company-wide BookStack instance that's the primary store of documentation, split into different sections for project information (per project) and rough notes (per employee). Everyone is expected to contribute to the former, and may also add to the latter if they wish to share something that may be useful to others.

Usually, helping someone else out with the information they need involves pointing them to the right page where it's already documented, or writing something up for them. Perhaps also talking them through it one-on-one if it's complex.

This works for us because we're required to provide reports to our customers every few weeks, in regards to what we've been working on in the each contract - in addition to any actual deliverables. Keeping everything well documented internally makes it much easier to document for our customers.

This is a small company of around 40 employees. Not sure how well this will scale as we grow, but it's been working well so far.

3 comments

Slack stands for Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge - I'm not sure why people don't like to use it to look up information, especially disjointed information not formally recorded elsewhere?

It shouldn't replace tools like BookStack, but nuking it every 2 weeks feels like its losing genuine knowledge too

> automatically wiped of messages older than two weeks

How do you determine historical truth in a potential conflict scenario, where a manager says "why didn't anybody tell me we'd be running a test at the customer site?" and the engineer says "but I announced it two weeks ago and you even thumbs-upped the post!"?

The same way as 'I've told you that when we ate lunch last week, remember?'. The point is to make sure Slack is treated the same way as a conversation, not as a documentation and project history
Yeah, where I'm at most "important" stuff is at least in a doc somewhere separate from chat or email.
The commenter just said slack is not the source of truth in the org. If the post was important, the result should have been documented in the source of truth.
Sure, but the context is that the message wasn't something that the org permanently documents to refer back to, like... an API or a list of deliverables or something. It's just run-of-the-mill workplace interpersonal communications and announcements, like announcing that there's going to be an earthquake drill, or that you're going to be working from home the first week of August. Not documentation. Until a miscommunication occurs and you're suddenly digging for records to piece together how things went wrong.

What communications tool would people use for announcing an earthquake drill? And what does the messaging tool get used for?

Do you send an email to keep the paper trail (with the downsides of email, like that record only being searchable by the people it was sent to at the time)? Or does somebody update the company wiki with records like "2022-07-30: jbay808 absent today due to doctor's appointment"?

What would be used in the total absence of an IM tool?

How was this managed 10 years ago? Email?

How was this managed 50 years ago? Physical bulletin board?

What the GP is trying to drive at is that slack should be treated like a passing conversation, and nothing more. It cannot be relied upon as a persistent source of truth or a knowledge base.

We try to apply the same philosphy within my team.

By not having a culture where people need historical records to cover their ass.
1000% this. If you cant trust each other absolutely none of this matters.

If for some reason you need an auditable record of your chats thats fine but decisions should hopefully be documented elsewhere and linked into the thread/convo.

> our internal chat rooms (not Slack, but a similar product) are automatically wiped of messages older than two weeks, to actively discourage anyone from using it as a knowledge store.

Or it's being wiped because your leadership team doesn't want anything shady uncovered in discovery or a warrant and "we do it to discourage anyone from using it as a knowledge store" is how it's being sold to everyone else.

But the shady shit can be put right into the other documentation systems OP mentioned. That’s not the reason.