Pkms vs Ckms
FleetingWhat matters in collaborative knowledge bases is not the same as what matters for your personal notes. In the general case I would say that you definitely need some carefully curated hierarchy + excellent search. The point is not “making connections to get insights” as in a zettelkasten. It is to share very specific information that must be easy to find in the most obvious place because the one searching has no way of knowing if the information is there in the first place.
- If the information is not available. that must be immediately obvious.
- It must be dead easy for any random person to add or correct information to that most obvious place. The author and time of the modification must be tracked.
- Ideally, multiple people should be able to collaborate in real time in the same page.
- The model must be flexible enough that it adapts to the myriad of different ways that people need to collaborate (it’s a jungle out there)
The wiki model seems to the best instance of that in current widespread use. Confluence is not a particularly brilliant implementation but it ticks all the boxes that are required in a corporate environment so it’s ubiquitous. Also, it beats Sharepoint, which is what it is replacing. Notion.so seems to be increasingly popular but it can’t be self-hosted and the search kind of sucks. Other people use Mediawiki, Dokuwiki, a myriad of documentation tools. It’s kind of a hard problem. There are also specialized tools that address specific workflows and are very effective at that (e.g. CRM)
Could we do better? Yes! Could we benefit from a knowledge graph? Possibly, if all the other conditions are also satisfied. Is the situation easy to improve? Hell no!
Another related point (I do not believe this is what you’re getting at, but it’s a common pitfall): Your personal notes should most definitely be kept separate from the common knowledge base. This is why features like Evernote sharing always end up failing in the market. Out of every 1KB of crap that any individual knowledge worker has to deal with on a daily basis, there’s maybe 10 bits of relevant information that should be shared. Everything else would just add noise that makes everybody’s life harder.
— some friend opinion
CKMS tragedy
To me, there are properties that make a good pkms, like the 5 steps of gtd. There are traps that a single person needs not to fall into, like the capture, clarify, organize at the same time antipattern. Doing those in a group means making time to do it together. People may feel like they waste their time with all those routines. Then, they stop doing them, and the CKMS is doomed.