Guides notes from the Internship Summer 21 cohort AMA

How we are moving from a Tribal knowledge organization (which works when you are small) to a scalable organization At Hack for LA, volunteer knowledge is a huge asset. And there's some of that knowledge built into various projects. If we don't document it, then it leaves with people who discovered it as soon as they move on. We're in this process now of making guides for everything. The community of practice (and the website as the guides get published) will store and share this knowledge in the organization when the volunteers leave. Essentially, when somebody comes to the organization, the first place after onboarding they will go is the community of practice. They will first fill out an experience profile on things they need to learn while they're here and then as they go learn those things, they will document their process with screenshots and reports and make them into links and put them in their experience profile, and these links will be added to a guide. This guide will be kept at HackforLA after these volunteers leave.

What is the volunteer’s incentive to make guides? What happens when people first join our organization is that maybe they don't have any experience in a specific area, but it's an important area for growth and they know they want to get it added to the resume, so they go find out more about it. They go talk to each of the teams and ask them, have they done this thing? How did they do it, and then get them to give you a download of that and you write it up. Here are the examples. Here are the assets they gave me that are related to this, you go and talk to three or four teams. Then you write about what you learned from the perspective of studying how things work in the field at Hack for LA. That’s the guide. The reason to do it is that you and anyone else can use it on future projects. That's part of our Agile practice. It's a great way to get up to speed on something quickly. Because you're not just going and pestering some team to spend a lot of time telling you how to do something, you're turning that time into a valuable asset that everyone can use. And so it's valuable for the person who's spending the time answering your questions, for you who's putting it together, and for everybody else. We're very into practical education here. I don't want to learn how to do something if I'm not going to use it.