Knowledge Sharing & Protecting

Those are two sides of the medal. For given information we have to decide: with whom we want to share it and from whom we want to protect it. Such joint approach solves many dilemmas and in my opinion is a right way to do it.

Choose a proper knowledge repository based on the target audience and its business need-to-know: secrets repository, project's wiki, company's wiki, Wikipedia. In general it is desired to share the information with the widest audience allowed, so others can benefit from it and contribute to it.

Copy-paste is important part of knowledge aggregation, but watch for possible copyright issues: revealing company's IP to public, using materials under GNU Free Documentation License in company's materials (GPL contamination).

Put information in a single repository and link to it from repositories for narrower audience if necessary, for example: if a tool can be used in other projects, describe it on company's wiki and if it’s widely used in your project put a link on your project’s wiki. If you comply to this rule all the time, there would be no need to dig project's wiki before it’s going EOL for useful info or it’s going to be lost otherwise. Also, if information is put in one place it’s easier to maintain.

Be careful with linking to repositories for narrower audience, because you can reveal some information, for example: if you put info on project's wiki containing only references to secrets repository, you reveal information that you have such knowledge and your laptop is worth stealing.

Don’t reinvent the wheel, for example: if a tool is already described on Wikipedia, just link to it on project's wiki and describe project’s specific usage. Check twice, before doing some work ;).