The end of community memory?

An experience I think a lot of us have these days in our interactions online, whether it be in the workplace, on social media, or even in real life is “We’ve had this conversation before…”

It’s perfectly natural. Different subsets of people come together and stories get retold. Our memories start getting a little worse as we age. And some people just love retelling stories.

But sometimes, and particularly in spaces where people reach out for help, especially with technical questions, it can be frustrating. For many communities, the eternal September has just become the norm. We’ve grown so accustomed to this that we expect nothing more.

While this still allows for the community to retain tribal knowledge through frequent retellings, it can be frustrating for those who don’t want to keep giving the same answers over and over. It makes the knowledge that exists within the community less discoverable, and it doesn’t allow for the community to learn as effectively together over time.

How did we get here?

With the rise of social media and chat platforms replacing email in the workplace, we’ve made it very easy for people to ask questions any time, and with a critical mass of people around, to get some kind of response. This is great for engagement, but not always great for getting thoughtful answers or having meaningful discussion that creates new knowledge. The people with the best answers may not be around, and people that do reply often do so with the same goal of immediacy – in these platforms, replying faster often feels more important than replying well.

We’re also used to these conversations disappearing as quickly as they begin. Once they scroll off the page, they are difficult to find, and even more difficult for others to stumble across them. 

Part of this plays into our expectations of what real life interactions look like; we don’t expect every conversation we have as we pass each other on the street or in the hallway to persist either. And that makes it feel natural. But purely ephemeral discussion isn't helpful to communities or organizations that are trying to build valuable knowledge together. We aren’t just passersby, and we aren’t complete strangers. We’re meant to be a community. 

What do communities with memory look like?

Communities that value long term access to knowledge they create will make longevity possible through some combination of creating intentional documentation, choosing tools that make it easier to find past conversations, and modelling behaviors that demonstrate the value of memory over meme.

In communities that have memory, new members are able to find answers to questions that they have on their own, and when they don’t, when others share information, they link to existing resources, rather than always repeating themselves.

Conversations within these communities have lifetimes that match their relevancy, and reference prior conversations throughout them.

Why ephemeral chat feels so comfortable

Chat is comfortable and comforting. In many ways, it’s a close analog of how we experience communicating with each other in the real world. As we might walk into a roomful of people having a conversation, we can step into a channel, see who’s around, and join in on the discussion currently taking place. As we might tap someone on the shoulder to have a brief side conversation, we can reach out on chat with a direct message. And just as we don’t take notes during our real life conversations or walk around with a backpack stenographer, we don’t expect everything we say in chat to be remembered.

Having chat as part of your community makes it easy for these more natural interactions to take place. But for a community to build knowledge over time, it’s not enough. 

So it’s not surprising that many communities which initially rely solely on a chat platform start to reach for other tools to capture things that matter.

Adding documentation to store memories

The first thing that communities reach for to add to their toolset is something that allows them to create some kind of documentation that can serve as that record. People within the community who are motivated to capture the most important information contribute to these documents, wikis, or websites, and for a period of time, they feel like they address the problem. 

With the right mix of people involved, it can even work long term. But more often than not, this documentation isn’t naturally discoverable within the community, doesn’t have enough motivated contributors to maintain it, and gradually drifts out of date.

Compounding effects of knowledge lost or gained

Lasting knowledge is more important to some communities than others, and some communities can hum along for a long time without it. But communities that derive their value from the knowledge they create do themselves and their legacy a disservice without it, and the lost knowledge has compounding effects.

Repeated questions drain the energy of the most knowledgeable members of the community, and when they leave, their knowledge goes with them. New members struggle to get up to speed and faced with a fragmented learning curve, might just drop out altogether.

Communities with memory benefit from the compounding effects it provides. A growing body of answered questions lets new members get up to speed even faster as time goes by. Knowledgeable members can reference prior answers when repeated questions come up if others didn’t find them themselves. And they can devote their time and energy towards creating new knowledge and adding more value.

Once it gains momentum, shared memory becomes a rising tide that lifts all boats.

A better way to remember

Communities who value lasting knowledge need a way to remember their conversations – and to have conversations worth remembering.

Communities that learn need a space that allows for structured conversations where people have enough time to process and understand what they’re hearing, and to think about what they're saying before they say it. These conversations need to remain open for people to participate in as long as they remain relevant, so that people can contribute to them when they are available, and so others can discover them when they become relevant to them.

Having a place for conversations like these doesn’t mean there shouldn’t also be places for more informal chat, or places to collaborate on documenting things that deserve to be captured with even more structure. But without a place for structured discussion, communities miss out on a huge opportunity to generate knowledge that will otherwise be lost.

Understanding your community’s capacity and desire to remember

If this resonates, here are some things you can do to help.

First, understand the different needs people have within the community. What problems does the lack of community memory create? What opportunities would open with an improved system for community memory? 

Consider those questions from the perspective of different people within your community. Starting with your own perspective as an individual is fine, but also make the effort to learn about others perspectives. In what ways does the community preserve memory today? What problems are people personally experiencing now? What are different individuals doing today to compensate for shortcomings in the existing system? What other communities do people participate in and what do they do differently? What do they prefer about the systems those other communities have in place? What do they prefer about your current community?

You don’t need exhaustive answers to these questions, but it’s helpful to begin with some inquiry and to stay curious about these questions as you explore different opportunities.

Improving your community’s capacity to preserve memory

As you start to better understand the problems with your existing community’s system for preserving memory, you’ll likely have plenty of ideas for things you’d like to try to improve. At that point, you can pick one of those problems and start experimenting with different approaches to solving it with the members of your community who have a desire to see an improvement in that area.

Start small at first, and gain some practice going through the process of identifying problems, coming up with experiments, trying things out, listening to feedback, making adjustments, and deciding when it’s time to move on to a different approach to the problem or a different problem to solve.

As you gain more experience, you may decide to try larger changes, and come up with different strategies for mitigating the risks of larger changes or experiments. 

These experiments may include introducing new tools or using existing features of your current platform more intentionally, but they will all require changes in behavior, and if successful, changes in your community’s culture. 

If you can, include some others who are more motivated to solve the problem early as close collaborators in the process. This will help you validate or invalidate assumptions sooner, rather than later, and to make appropriate adjustments before expecting others who are less motivated to play along. And if you determine together that a given change in your community is worth rolling out more widely, they can help you establish any new norms in behavior that are required with others.

Incorporating memory into a community built on chat

If your community is built on chat and discovers an unmet need to preserve knowledge, you and your close collaborators may naturally become a subcommunity that has knowledge preservation as a shared value. Even if the community as a whole doesn’t share that value yet, you can take this opportunity to embrace it together with your collaborators and experiment with different ways to explore ideas in greater depth, to record decisions you make, and to make discussions leading to those decisions discoverable.

As you discover ways of doing that which work well for you, you can invite others to join you in the process when they express a desire to participate in this different mode of engaging with ideas in your community.

Designing a community to preserve memory from the ground up 

Building a community from the ground up comes with its own sets of challenges and being able to chat among your closest collaborators can help you soundboard early ideas and clarify things you’re also discussing asynchronously. But if you know up front that you want your community to create and preserve knowledge, then you have the freedom to choose a set of tools and establish founding norms that are aligned with that goal. 

Practice using structured discussions early together. This is the time to experiment together and learn more about what tool to reach for in different scenarios, and how to bring the important parts of any side conversation back into a place where your future selves can find them long term.

As you bring on additional collaborators, encourage them to read these conversations when they join, and to ask questions. Their questions will help you see the value the knowledge you’ve been creating has for new members of your team, and your answers will help you fill any gaps for them and others who join your team after them. 

When you’re ready to invite new members into your community, you and your team will be in a much better position to build a community with them that can continue to create knowledge with lasting value.

Memory Matters

The communities that thrive for more than a brief period of time are the ones that learn how to remember. Memory is more than the storage and recall of facts; it’s continuity, identity, and shared purpose. Communities without memory might feel vibrant in the moment, but they’re constantly starting from scratch, endlessly reliving the same conversations, and exhausting the energy of their most committed members.

Communities with memory gain leverage. They grow stronger with each contribution, and they create a compounding reservoir of knowledge that makes it easier for new members to join, for experienced members to deepen their contributions, and for everyone to engage in discussions that create a lasting legacy. The more they remember, the more they can build.

If we want our communities to last – and to matter – we need to move beyond ephemeral chatter and invest in the structures, tools, and norms that let memory take root. It’s not enough to talk together; we have to think together, build together, and recall together. That’s how communities go from a loose collection of conversations to a living body of knowledge, carried forward by everyone who joins.