So much knowledge not being applied Most organisations have a lot of documents and data floating around that hardly ever gets revisited or used. They all have research, reading, and relevant information collecting dust. Stuff that should be informing the decisions and strategies of the company. Some of it sits unread in a knowledge base or a wiki. Some of it lies in the drives of individual employees who don’t have a way to share it productively. So much knowledge not being applied! Except that’s not how we work as human beings. If you haven’t read it, experienced it, and contextualised it, then it isn’t knowledge to you. Knowledge is a quality that people possess, not documents, and the only way to transfer it from one place to another is for people at both ends to apply themselves and make it their own. Baldur Bjarnason, On online collaboration and our obligations as makers of software knowledgedocumentationwork
Dependence is more profitable than education A customer who pays—in advance—for service contracts is a more stable income source than a customer who has fully mastered a product's use. Customer dependence is more profitable than customer education. What I find truly baffling are manuals—hundreds of pages long—that accompany software applications, programming languages, and operating systems. Unmistakably, they signal both a contorted design that lacks clear concepts and an intent to hook customers. Niklaus Wirth, A Plea for Lean Software The design concept documentation
The brilliance of notion This, I think, is the brilliance of Notion, and what makes it one of the best examples of “fidelity to digital information” that I’ve come across. The structure of the app reflects the structure of the web itself: digital content is purposefully formatted, like semantic HTML elements, and exists in a hierarchical structure (directories on the web, nested pages in Notion), yet can be linked and referenced to create a complex network of information. And pages in Notion reveal the structure of the information: when nesting a page within a page, the child page always displays on the parent page. There’s no way to create a child page that doesn’t display on a parent page, no way to obscure the structure of the information. The semantic structure of Notion reflects the semantic structure of the web itself. Brandon Dorn, Web Brutalism, seamfulness, and notion Designing Synced Blocks hierarchystructure