How are teams verifying new Cards within Collections?

  • 19 February 2021
  • 8 replies
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Hey! Curious how people are approaching verifying new cards within collections, as I wonder if we've over-engineered our approach. Right now, we have 8 verifiers (called guru gurus) split by segment/product who are meant to review new cards as they come in and check against relevancy, recency and make sure it's not duplicative. In reality, there are only a few people on the team, mostly on Ops or senior members, who are adding new content to the collection. Their content doesn't need to go through the "guru guru" check. *Basically - how do you successfully gatekeep new content to your collections?*

8 replies

Userlevel 3
Hi Mia,
We've taken a reverse approach where we don't gate content at all. Instead, we encourage everyone to contribute where they feel comfortable and then assign subject matter experts to areas as verifiers. The SMEs are primarily responsible for the content's accuracy, and I cover down on basic formatting, organization, and other administrative tasks. I've created a tool that allows me to verify content on behalf of others so that I can make small changes to content without bothering anyone with a verification request. This approach isn't for everyone, and it certainly has its pitfalls, but it has allowed us to generate around 500 fairly useful articles in less than 2 years.
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Guru god-mode?4yqc37_5532.jpg
Userlevel 3
lol, Paul I use the API to generate a token for the assigned verifier and then post the content as that user. The post operation is really just a copy/paste of the existing content, but because it uses the token of the user assigned as the verifier, it verifies the article.
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Any complaints from peers, managers, anyone in the org, re: ... anything?
Userlevel 3
No, but we approached docs with this strategy from the beginning of our efforts to increase info availability and general documentation. That being said, I think that transitioning to a more open approach to docs for an org that's been doing a lot of gatekeeping and general admin will prob hit a few snags, but I think it's worth the trouble if your ultimate goal is to increase the effectiveness and availability of information across the org. I'm ok with the occasional shoddy article squeaking in, that's easy to fix, but what we don't want is folks with something meaningful to share with the org to be prevented from doing so, or having to jump through hoops.
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I should have been more specific with my question. What I really meant to ask was, have you had any incidences where colleagues, business process owners, anyone...has accused you of editing their work without 'rights' to do so, considering you are doing it as them?
Personally, and to your point - I'm very okay with shoddy articles if it means my team(s) are moving closer to something resembling Guru's knowledge philosophy (https://app.getguru.com/card/cxgKkExi) but do you wonder if the capability you've enabled for yourself may have unintended (negative) consequences or accusations?
Userlevel 3
Great question! That's not an issue that we've run into yet, but I'm sure at some point I'll make a change that someone disagrees with, and we'll hash it out. I've avoided the issue so far by being thoughtful about my edits and getting stakeholder sign-off whenever it seems like a good idea. A lot of the changes I make are around clarity and overall organization. My ability to change docs is related to my position as the primary steward of our documentation. To enable everyone to contribute freely, we need an admin to do QA and make changes without being inhibited. For instance, I don't want to bother a potentially busy SME with a verification request because I rewrote a sentence or two or made some other trivial update. More generally, we're fortunate that we have an open culture where folks feel empowered to approach whatever problems they're interested in or challenge whatever they disagree with. So even if I did do something that someone had a problem with, I'm sure we'd find a way through to the other side just fine.
Also, love that Guru knowledge philosophy card. I didn't know about that. :slightlysmilingface:
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this is the way

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