1. Has your organization changed how it communicates since the Cold War?
2. If you swapped a computer for a typewriter,  and email with an inter-office courier, are the processes similar?

Today’s default workflow

Systems that naturally capture and expose process

URLs are how we share information today

The value of giving concepts URLs

1. URLs serve to record what decision was made, who made it, and why. They alleviates the need for “you had to be there” and “go ask Bob”-type inquiries. It provides a single, incontrovertible source of truth for the organization’s intentions, and equally important, exposes the reasoning behind the decision, reducing the tendency for top-down decisions to be communicated as “because I said so”. In the military, this is the concept of commander’s intent, and it provides organization members with the context to continue the mission despite evolving circumstances. Process artifacts also naturally capture what other alternatives were considered but ultimately rejected, preventing the organization from rehashing the same conversation six months (or six years) down the line.
   
   
2. Giving process a URL forces the moving party to distill their ideas down into written form, to capture the essential elements of their proposal, and to articulate them in the clearest way possible. There’s a reason it’s called “reducing something writing”. It forces you to maximize the signal to noise ratio and focus on what matters. Once in written form, in addition to being more potent, those ideas suddenly become scalable. A meeting room can only fit so many people, and an all hands can only accommodate so many time zones, but given the right technology, the effort required to articulate an idea in writing to one person is the same as the effort required to articulate that same idea to a million, regardless of time or location. URLs allow ideas to spread organically.
   
   
3. URLs provide organizations the ability to link related concepts, to reference prior art, and to ground discussions in the tangible. Once decisions have URLs, related decisions can reference one another, creating an interconnected web of the organization’s collective knowledge. Decisions rarely happen in a vacuum and the ability to reference prior (or dependent) decisions — with the full context immediately available to those who click the link — becomes immensely valuable to grounding discussions in concrete specifics. It’s no longer “Alice would want us to do X”, but “here’s what Alice has already said on the topic”, or “here are the latest numbers Alice ran last week”. Especially when discussing technical matters – be they software, financial, legal, or administrative – being able to easily bring images, charts, and other quantitative resources directly into the discussion grounds the discussion in facts, not opinions, and increases the velocity of decision making by reducing the blocking synchronicity of traditional means of access to organizational knowledge.
   
   
4. URLs allow stakeholders, whether directly or tangentially affected by a decision, to opt-in to an infinite amount of organizational context. Imagine a typical policy decision. “We’re now putting covers on our TPS reports”. Traditionally this edict might be handed down in a PDF’d memo on company letter head (printed, signed, and scanned of course to make it “official”). Those affected get only the context provided by the memo itself, which because it requires an additional step to expose the process surrounding the decision, often includes only the final outcome and the means to carry it out, not why it was made or how. If instead, that decision were posted to an internal company blog, with a link to the forum in which the relevant decisions were made, not only would that provide instantly more pedigree, but suddenly anyone affected - delighted or disgruntled - can freely opt-in to as much or as little context as they’d like, increasing the likelihood of genuine buy in and organization-wide alignment, an alignment that can now transcend the superficial.
   
   
5. URLs enable asynchronous and distributed workflows. URLs are inherently asynchronous. While most of their value comes from the opportunities afforded by their archival nature, but in the short term, they allow teams to capture day-to-day information, and share that information across working styles, timezones, and geography in near real time. Moving discussions from meatspace meetings to asynchronous mediums like chat and issues make those conversations less exclusionary (e.g., only those that could physically be in a particular room at a particular moment), and allow distributed stakeholders to participate on equal footing. It’s hard to imagine a distributed or asynchronous workflow that doesn’t rely heavily on URLs. Sure, you could theoretically have a distributed but synchronous team, conducting business through regularly scheduled conference calls, or an asynchronous team that works exclusively by email and other non-linkable means, but both would be far from an evolved workflow, let alone the ideal, especially for those for whom attending in-person meetings are not an option.
   
   

URL does not mean public free-for-all

1. Participation - There’s no reason a URL can’t be read only. A great example of this is a chat transcript, if you use something like Slack. You can link to any line in the history of a conversation, to provide others with context as to what was discussed, but those reading the conversation six months after the fact have no expectation of being able to reply or participate within the same context.
   
   
2. Scope - You can expose context to a select group, without exposing that context to the entire world (or even the entire organization). Just like in real life, not everyone is invited to every meeting, and not everyone should have access to the details of every decision. Providing something a URL does not change what’s appropriate to share. Salary negotiations and interpersonal disputes should be limited to the employee, HR, and their direct supervisor. Legal decisions should be shared within the legal team, but regardless of the scope, the value of the URL remains the same. It’s far preferable for there to be a digital record capturing who, how, and why each decision was made, available to those that were part of the decision, than for it to only exist on paper, in the hallways, or in unspoken sentiment, which a flood, career change, or memory lapse can wipe out entirely (and isn’t shareable as other members leave or join the team).
   
   
3. Time - You can have a URL that exposes context after the fact. In the open source world, this is common as developers “open source” a project, and its associated revision history and discussions when a formal milestone is reached (e.g, “v1.0”), and well after many crucial design decisions have been made. As with the above example, if the executive team decides that all TPS reports should now have cover sheets, assuming there’s nothing personal about the discussion, there’s no reason they can’t make that decision in private, and share out the context as they share the decision, allowing the entire organization to stand on equal footing in terms of access to organizational knowledge as to why the decision was made and how.
   
   

Fostering an appropriate culture

1. Capturing process - There’s a challenge in creating a culture whereby organization members appreciate (and prefer) mediums that naturally capture and expose process. It’s easy to bump into someone in the break room and brainstorm a new initiative, but to realize the value described above, that idea needs to be captured and memorialized in a higher-fidelity, asynchronous medium. And even if the idea occurs in a discussion in chat or GitHub issues, new employees need to be socialized to how to use those modern collaboration tools, and more importantly, why, in many cases, they should be preferred to in-person, meetings.
   
   
2. Responsible participation - There’s a challenge in creating a culture in which organization members appreciate their responsibility to participate responsibly. Just because you can participate in a discussion, doesn’t mean you should. Most new hires face this problem as they’re introduced to GitHub’s workflow internally. There’s a firehose of information that’s immediately made available to you, and you must learn to prioritize what matters to your role, and why, or risk drowning in an onslaught of information. That same risk is true on the flip side. The potential for Monday morning (and Tuesday, and Wednesday morning) quarterbacking increases exponentially as an organization grows, and without the proper cultural framework, transparency can quickly become seen as unproductive, inefficient, or a political liability.
   
   
3. Necessary tooling - As my colleague @spraints aptly points out, URLs are still very technical. As ubiquitous as URLs are, not everyone can publish something to the intra- or internet. The tooling has gotten better — projects like WordPress have done much to democratize the internet — but even the acronym URL is still intimidating if processes don’t naturally create them. Much like RESTful APIs did for data, most critically URLs provide a standard means for teams within a company to define their interface to the rest of the organization (or the world). URLs provide a human-API to answer questions like “where can others look for your work output?” and “where can others ask questions or start a conversation with your team?”. URL-centric organizations go out of their way to provide non-technical teams with the means to create process-capturing URLs within the context of their natural workflow.
   
   

Knowledge work as craft