The company wiki
What the wiki is
A living record of how your company actually works, written from the decisions your team makes in chat.
Every company has a documentation problem, and it isn't that people can't write. It's that the decisions get made in chat, the doc gets written once, and six weeks later the doc is wrong and everyone knows to ask a person instead.
Gini's wiki is written from the chat. When something gets decided in a channel Gini is in, the page changes.
What's in it
Not meeting notes. The things a new hire would need three months to absorb:
- How your product actually works, in your team's language
- Who owns what, and who to ask
- Decisions, and why they went that way
- Processes people follow but nobody wrote down
- The vocabulary: what your team calls things, and what those things mean
You can read all of it at app.ginicomputer.com → Wiki.
Why it beats a normal wiki
It doesn't rot. When a decision changes in a channel, Gini revises the page and notes what changed. The failure mode of every other wiki (accurate on day one, quietly wrong by month three) is the one thing this is designed against.
Nobody has to write it. The tax on documentation is that writing it is someone's job and it's always the job that slips. Here it's a side effect of work already happening.
It survives people leaving. When someone goes, what they knew stays. That's worth more than it sounds, and you usually find out how much about two weeks after their last day.
What it's for
It's the thing that makes Gini's other answers good. A question like this:
You@Gini why did we drop the enterprise tier?
Gini
Decided 12 March in #pricing. Three enterprise deals had stalled on procurement for 4+ months each while self-serve was growing 20% month over month, and Sam's argument was that enterprise was eating the roadmap for revenue that hadn't arrived.
Marked as revisit-in-Q4, and nobody has revisited it. The thread is here, and the deal analysis Priya wrote is attached to it.
...isn't Gini being clever. It's Gini reading a page it wrote when the decision happened.
New hires get the most out of this. The questions people are slightly embarrassed to ask a colleague for the third time (what does this acronym mean, who actually approves this, why do we do it this way) are exactly the questions the wiki answers well.
It only knows the rooms it's in
The wiki is built from channels Gini has been invited to. A decision made somewhere Gini isn't doesn't reach it. If the wiki has a hole, the usual cause is a channel, not a bug.
It's yours
Every page is readable, editable and deletable by your team. Gini writes a first draft of your company's knowledge; it doesn't own it.
You can also tell it what not to write down. See How pages get written.