2020-11-20T0611 - Information Quality

Information Quality is the blanket term for these values:

Avalibility
Discoverability
Relevance
Conciseness
Context Free

We'll talk about each below:

1. Avalibility

Everyone has the ability to access as much information as possible without running into permission walls or information silos. This includes decisions, discussions, code documentation, company rules, etc... This is often not the default in Synchronous Communication, mainly because people tend to be shy of public channels.

2. Discoverability

Information is only useful if you can find it. Being able to quickly find information is just as important as having it. If information is unstructured, it'll be unlikely to ever be.

3. Relevance

Information is showing up at the right time to the right person (in terms of notifications). There's lots of things that can interfere with this such as having small amount of categories that are infinitely deep or [[Notion#^ceff68|when there's no clear "publish" time]].

4. Conciseness

“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” ― Mark Twain

Writing concisely is hard. Yet we should not force the user to read everything or be hostile to the reader

Also skimming should be possible, which is why The power of a title is so important.

5. Context Free

Got this one from Gitlab's Handbook first approach, but when you do Asynchronous Communication [[Asynchronous communication, The cure to notification overload (Youtube)#^11b40c|you should avoid the need for "context"]]. By Context I mean, that even a new hire would know what you're talking about, avoid achronyms, and talk in a way that you didn't have to "be there".

A good example is in the Gitlab meetup on Async communication (Youtube) where she talks about a co-worker that asked,

"could you respond to Shane's question?"

but in reality should have said,

"Could you respond to shane's question in the #all-remote channel with your avalibility"

Longer? Yes. Took longer to write? Yes. But the benefit is that it doesn't require follow up questions which is important if you want to have cure notification overload, and also just has a longer "shelf life", meaning that you'll understand the data even a year from now and don't have to rely on Tribal Knowlege.