What's it all for?
“Who’s actually looking at all this stuff?” is a valid question. We have sometimes wondered whether, as documenters, we are talking to ourselves; and the role of a documenter can feel thankless at times.
However, the value of documentation only becomes apparent long after the event, when people no longer remember what happened, and want to check. We have often heard “Oh, I wish we had documented XYZ”, but never “I wish we hadn’t documented it...”
And documentation can help us hang on to what we did and what we learnt. In our fast-changing ecosystems, it can be all too easy to feel that our work, our thinking, and our ideas are just throwaway and valueless; recording our work and our thinking gives it a solidlity and realness, and helps us see how valuable it is. It also makes it more shareable, so we can collaborate and build on it. All these things are good for people's heads.
Three key issues that might influence your documentation approach:
Documentation is not useful unless people can find it. So when costing a documentation task, include the task of organising and presenting the material; and the task of publicising it.
Privacy is one constraint on documentation. It’s not appropriate to document every meeting; and it is vital to ensure that participants understand and consent to how and where documentation will be shared, and that you have a plan for how you will proceed if someone wants to opt out.
In relation to this, we’ve noted that there are some things in Catalyst that we tend not to record - for example, a Zoom chat. There is a tacit, Catalyst-wide assumption that Chat is ephemeral, private, and not fair game for a documenter. If you want to document it, then in this community at least, you should seek explicit consent; and you should consider anonymising it. And in other communities you might work in - the tacit assumptions there will probably be different, so try to find out what they are before you start - and, if in doubt, ask :-)
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