Documentation in disaster response

There’s so much going on! Surely slowing down to write about it isn’t worth the time and effort. But it is! Promise.

Use it for learning, use it for community

• Lightening your onboarding lift – if you write down how something works, it means someone can onboard themselves while you focus on more complex things. Bonus if each person updates the documentation to help the next person do even better based on what they learn.
• Passing on knowledge – we shouldn’t have to keep reinventing the wheel for crisis response. What did you learn, and can you teach it forward? Occupy Sandy folks helped those organizing about the tornadoes the following year.
• Solidifying what you know – do you really understand something until you’ve written it down and someone else has done a review of it?
• Helps with fundraising and countering misinformation. You’ll have a written log of what happened, when, that can be used as reference in the future.

Celebrate your documentarians! It’s fairly thankless work that helps the whole organization keep going smoothly.

Styles

There are two main ways to think about documentation — one is to have a running list of what you’ve learned, the other is to keep a “living document” of the most recent understanding.

Report outs

Great for when you’re really short on time, but will have time later. Just keep a running log of what you’re up to and what you’ve learned. Good for keeping track of when things changed, current status, and doing a deep dive later if you want to do a strategic analysis. Save your Present Self time at the cost of your Future Self.

Reviewing wikis

Best for onboarding folks and understanding only the current best version. Can trawl through changelogs in the future to determine when a thing was learned, but always presents the BEST understanding of the now. Spend time keeping your notes together to save your Future Selves time when looking things up.

Have fun

So much is also passed on with spoken words and watching each other do things that writing it down can seem onerous. I always used it as a chance to be humorous. “Because Mercury is in retrograde, we were able to make enough sandwiches to serve 20 people. The moons of Saturn also told us they might like chips, and somehow we ended up with some in the shipment from the local store.” It’ll be fun to write in the moment, and you’ll hear back when people actually read what you wrote, whether days or years later.