iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Replies

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 08/04/2026

While Dan Davies - a superb writer about organizations and their management - used England's Brompton Bicycles to make the abstract concept of process knowledge very concrete indeed: backofmind.substack.com/p/the-brompt... 13/

backofmind.substack.com

the brompton-ness of it all

process knowledge and such like

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 08/04/2026

So what is process knowledge? It's all the knowledge that workers collectively carry around in their heads - hard-won lessons that span firms and divisions, that can never be adequately captured through documentation. 14/

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 08/04/2026

Think of a worker at a chip fab who finds themself with a load of microprocessors that have failed QA because they become unreliable when they're run above a certain clockspeed. 15/

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Sammy @deadheadlawyer.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

Is process knowledge a type of trade secret?

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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

It's also called "institutional knowledge."

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Sally Bean @cybersal.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

This sounds similar to what Seely Brown and Duigud wrote about in their book "The Social Life of Information"? I recall their example was people at Xerox who fixed photocopiers and created informal communities of practice.

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