Why a Wiki is important §

First, I want to set a bit of context.

I’ve been working mainly remotely since starting my career. Back when i started out at Deutsche Telekom, working remotely was quite new, and thus i had to slowly self-learn how to accommodate to that setting. But, as I had’nt yet been tainted by previous experiences of working in an office, I’d like to think i adapted quite well.

Since then, I’ve switched to DHL, where most of my work has also been remote. 💻

And now, I’m very close to starting my startup journey, with working on Datapods.app fulltime.

You can expect some more posts about datapods and our journey in the near future :)

---

Lets get to the point. §

Whenever there’s any kind of remote organisation, asyncronous communication is king. Meeting are great in some cases, for example when you really need to do some high-bandwith discussion on a contentious topic, or deep-dive into some technical problem.

But for most other kinds of communication, async simply wins. It’s more convenient, more efficient, and works across timezones.

Often times, in my corporate jobs of times past, I’ve though that thought that probably everyone in these types of highly structured organisations has come across:

This meeting could have been an email (or slack conversation).

Now, while Email or Slack are certainly better than a 1hr meeting, these modes of communication have their own problems.

So I’d like to make the point, that an easy to access, searchable Wiki, is really the best solution to document any kind of descision or discussion.

This borrows alot from the typical software development workflow, where after a feature has been discussed, built and tested, its functionality is usually documented somewhere.

We’ve been using Outline for Datapods, and its been great. You can assign roles, share pages even with external people, and it integrates well with slack and gsuite :)

And the best part, you can host it yourself ^^

Work in progess, more to come :)