the station / sector 07
Knowledge distribution
How to tell where you arePick your most critical subsystem and ask who could debug it at 3am. If it is one name, you do not have a documentation problem, you have a single point of failure that takes holidays. Now ask when that person last wrote anything down that someone else has since used.
Who can actually do the thing, and whether that survives a resignation.
This is a social axis and it behaves differently from the technical ones: it decays on its own. Nobody removes knowledge from a team on purpose. People leave, systems change, documents go stale, and the set of people who can safely touch a subsystem shrinks by default unless something actively works against it.
It is also the axis most often confused with its artefacts. A wiki is not knowledge distribution; a second person who has done the task under real conditions is. The test is not whether it is written down, but whether someone who was not there has used the writing successfully.
Controls that move you along it
- ›One reviewer is not enough for security-relevant code
- ›A review with no discussion is not a review
- ›A second person has actually done the risky task
- ›Give every component an owner, and watch the drive-by edits
- ›Know the truck factor of anything you cannot afford to lose
- ›Onboard new contributors deliberately, with people, not just docs
- ›Signal the removal before you make it
- ›Threat-model the design, and keep doing it after the training
- ›Make it safe to say the thing nobody wants to hear
- ›Put static analysis in the review, not in a backlog
- ›Someone drives the critical path with a screen reader
- ›Write down decisions, with the reasoning and the alternatives