Knowledge Management and Information Architecture for Team Coordination

Date: 2026-04-23
Related: docs/plans/2026-04-21-team-coordination-hub-notes
Supersedes: docs/plans/2026-04-21-team-coordination-hub-notes

Purpose

This is a knowledge management and information architecture layer for team coordination.

• Make the team's information legible, findable, and maintainable.
• Support coordination, planning, and work initiation by surfacing the right context at the right time.
• Improve the tao site as the front door for this system, starting with the landing page and key destination pages.

This is not a decision about the team's working process itself, though it supports and shapes that process.

The guiding principle: a visitor landing on the tao should reach what they need in one click, and the landing page should present no more than 3–5 primary options before nesting further detail.

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Jobs to Be Done

JTBDs are grouped by the six major questions from the team coordination hub notes. Two categories: A = find/navigate (primary — address now), B = update/edit (secondary — log now, address later).

Status legend:

• 🟡 Exploring - still being worked through
• 🟠 Recommendation - recommended by e.g. Armelle and Rufus
• 🟢 Agreed - agreed by the team

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1. Portfolio View

"How can any team member quickly get a current high-level view of Life Itself's active initiatives and projects?"

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2. Weekly Focus

"How can any team member quickly see what area or initiative each person is focused on this week?"

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3. Initiation Format

"What is the minimum canonical format for starting a new initiative or project, and how are new ones proposed?"

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4. Document Conventions

"What are the minimum shared conventions for where different kinds of materials should live?"

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5. Maintenance Model

"What gardening and maintenance work is needed to keep the coordination layer accurate, and who is responsible?"

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6. Coordination Level

"What is the minimum viable shared coordination the team actually needs?"

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7. General Orientation (new — beyond original six questions)

These JTBDs came up as we mapped the user experience but don't map to one of the six hub questions. They are primarily about helping people orient to Life Itself as a whole.

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Landing Page Design

Principle

Max 4 primary cards on the landing page. Each card: icon or image, 1-line description, single link. Nest everything else.

Proposed primary cards (maps to P0–P1 JTBDs above)

┌─────────────────────┐  ┌─────────────────────┐
│  📋 Portfolio       │  │  💡 Capture an Idea  │
│  What we're         │  │  Log a thought       │
│  working on         │  │  or suggestion       │
│  → /portfolio/      │  │  → /ideas            │
└─────────────────────┘  └─────────────────────┘

┌─────────────────────┐  ┌─────────────────────┐
│  📅 Weekly Focus    │  │  🚀 Start a Project  │
│  Who's doing what   │  │  Propose or kick     │
│  this week          │  │  off something new   │
│  → /plans/          │  │  → /getting-stuff-   │
│                     │  │    done#projects     │
└─────────────────────┘  └─────────────────────┘

Secondary navigation (sidebar or "More" section):

• Onboarding → onboarding.md
• People → /people/
• Strategy → /strategy/
• Operations → ops.md
• Communications → communications.md
• Meetings → /meetings/

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Implementation Steps

Step 1: Define the jobs (this document — done ✓)

Step 2: Fill the gaps — create missing destination pages

• Create inbox.md — ideas inbox with two paths: Google Doc in Drive folder or direct GitHub issue, both tracked as GitHub issues with inbox label. Drive folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1lXkwDJzeh4ky399XTJWXjhvtDlijK6dr
• Create start-project.md — Working Backwards PR/FAQ process: press release required, FAQ and SCQH optional
• Add a short document conventions page or section (from the hub notes answers) — deferred; prefer surfacing implicitly via UX rather than a separate doc
• Stub a /strategy/index.md — already exists as strategy/README.md

Step 3: Redesign index.md landing page

• Replace current wall-of-links with 4 primary cards (HTML/Tailwind grid)
• Move remaining links into secondary "Everything else" section with markdown subheadings
• Cards confirmed rendering on live site

Step 4: Improve sidebar / navigation config — done ✓

• Simplify nav bar: Portfolio, Plans, People, Handbook, Strategy
• Remove Initiatives, Projects, Meetings from nav (accessible via portfolio or off-repo)
• Exclude AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md from publishing (contentExclude)
• Hide strategy/archive/ and strategy/log/ from sidebar (contentHide)

Step 5: Repo reorganisation — done ✓

Not in original plan but done as part of this work:

• Create handbook/ — moved all operational how-to docs there
• Create strategy/plans/ — moved annual plans (renamed to year only)
• Move governance.md to strategy/archive/
• Add handbook/README.md index page
• Add redirects in config.json for all moved paths
• Update AGENTS.md to document the four-layer structure

Step 6 (future): Weekly focus

• Decide on approach for lightweight weekly focus visibility — options: GitHub issues, a dedicated weekly update format, or something else. handbook/weekly-focus.md is stubbed as placeholder. Needs team input on what level of visibility is actually useful before building anything.

Step 7 (future): Search optimisation

• Ensure key pages have good front-matter titles so Typesense (Flowershow built-in search) surfaces them correctly

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Open Questions

1. Idea inbox location — resolved: handbook/inbox.md with Google Drive folder + GitHub issue tracking
2. Cards as HTML or Markdown — resolved: confirmed working on live site
3. Portfolio map update process: Is the portfolio auto-generated from project files, or manually maintained? Affects B1.

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Additional JTBDs

These jobs came up in the team discussion after the initial JTBD set. They are about planning capacity, scope, and making the monthly/weekly plan easier to navigate.