Tragedy of the Stream

Mike Caulfield

This is the Tragedy of the Stream, folks. The conversations of yesterday, which contain so much useful information, are locked into those conversations, frozen in time. To extract the useful information from them becomes an unrewarding and at times impossible endeavor. Few people, if any, stop to refactor, rearrange the resources, gloss or introduce them to outsiders. We don’t go back to old pieces to add links on them to the things we have learned since, or rewrite them for clarity or timelessness.

I worry about this. At Fusionary, we use Slack for nearly all internal communication. It’s fantastic, but important corporate knowledge becomes lost in the stream. It’s not just Slack. It’s email, JIRA, Basecamp, etc.

I sometimes make the effort to extract valuable information from Slack, etc. and refactor it in our Confluence wiki, but I’m the only person who does and it’s not enough.