Tribal Librarian? What on earth does that mean?!
To understand where I got such a strange name for my blog, we first need to understand “tribal knowledge”. iSixSigma.com defines tribal knowledge as “any unwritten information that is not commonly known by others within a company” [1]. For our purposes here, I’m using it slightly more generally to refer to any information (either correct or not) that is “known” by the people close to a particular subject, but is otherwise hard to come by. I notice cases of tribal knowledge all the time. It happens at work in the form of going on a hunt for the right person instead of the right reference document to answer some trivial question that I know has been asked a hundred times before me. It happens in my spare time in the form of encountering the same pitfalls that ever other consumer of some API has encountered during his first use of it, but that even still no good documentation exists to explain. Everywhere I encounter tribal knowledge, it just bugs me.
With this blog, I want to help stamp out tribal knowledge to the extent that I can, and that’s where the “librarian” part of the title comes in. Calling myself a librarian probably misses the mark a bit. After all, a librarian technically does more along the lines of managing a collection of existing knowledge than collecting new knowledge. But “tribal documentarian” and “tribal blogger” just don’t sound as nice. Besides, I hope to be in the position of managing a good-sized collection of existing knowledge here soon. In the meanwhile, I’ll get to work doing the collecting.
[1] http://www.isixsigma.com/dictionary/Tribal_Knowledge-488.htm
Postscript–something about me
I figure since this is my first post in this blog, you might want to hear a little bit about me. I’m a developer on the Windows Client Performance Team, and have been at Microsoft for nearly five years. I love working here because of the cool people and the cool projects that surround me on all sides. Aside from computer technology, my interests include writing and solving puzzles of most any kind, reading (mostly sci-fi with a little bit of fantasy thrown in), and studying language (natural and constructed, human and computer). I also enjoy hiking, camping, and backpacking, though I do less of these than I would like to admit. I expect to include articles from time to time on all of the above and probably some other stuff too. Let me know if there’s anything in particular that you’d like to hear more about.
Until next time when we’ll talk about the systray taskbar notification area, let’s contemplate it on the tree of woe.