Treasure Chest

Building a knowledge hub

Sometimes called a wiki, playbook, or intranetーand frequently a fusion of allーknowledge hubs are the center point of an organization’s understanding, sharing, and collaboration. Outside of work, you’re likely familiar with sites like

Wikipedia⁠

YouTube⁠

, or

Reddit⁠

that offer a space for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing. In business,

Confluence⁠

(knowledge base),

Sharepoint⁠

, and

Google Sites⁠

(intranet) are common ways to distribute information.

When building knowledge hubs in the past, I’ve found challenges with them to be

@Scattered⁠

@Static⁠

@Not engaging ⁠

, and without support for

@Multi-media⁠

, among other

Challenges⁠

. Finding information to centralize is an investment of time, and it feels wasted if no one can find or read the institutional knowledge you’ve put to paper. I’ve felt discouraged at past companies when hacking together resources from email, Slacks, a Google Doc / Slide deck here, and a printed manual there; many resources ended up forgotten in desktop folders, browser bookmarks, or filing cabinets.

At Coda though, our 14 new hires are referencing their

@New Hire Onboarding⁠

each day, and we just launched V1 of our

@Company Wiki⁠

. Codans are engrained to update their progress status, asking questions, and engaging with the content as they go.

⁠

⁠

Disengaged to inspired readers

Having beautiful, engaging docs is a top priority for us - probably because we run Coda on Coda.

You can personalize your doc with cover images, streamline it with collapsed content (like this section here!), and organize with outlines. We’ve got embedding and almost every standup has a doc with a Spotify Pack. But the true magic are the buttons. Every Coda standup, meeting, and presentation has a doc with buttons.

I’ve seen buttons used for:

Upvoting ideas and questions for discussion

To notify an author that a page needs updated

New hires to indicate when they need help

Send an ice breaker to Slack

You can see some examples here but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

⁠

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.