So I’m actually the guy who mostly maintains the website and sends out the blast e-mails for my longtime teacher, Rabbi Natan Margalit over at Organic Torah.  Organic Torah, Inc., is a small nonprofit organization centering around Rabbi Natan’s teachings, including his “organic torah” (click over there to read more) as well as courses he teaches each year on rabbinic text with a focus on the “organic” structure of Mishnah.  It’s a typical startup nonprofit situation.  As I progressed toward my own rabbinic ordination, and especially during my year of study in Israel, it became necessary for people other than me to maintain the website and send out blast e-mails.  So, I developed a couple of procedures — as I explain in the Documentation essay within Chapter 10 of Growth through Governance — to help someone unfamiliar with the process carry out the periodic tasks on the website that need doing.

Click here to view two of the procedures I made for Organic Torah.  The idea of procedures is to use quite a lot of detail, but to use plain English and explain any jargon terms.  A procedure should be useful to a reasonably intelligent person who has no prior experience with your organization or the software products it uses, beyond basic ability to use office software.  In this case, my procedures were designed to be useful to Natan in case he needed to do his own website updates, but also to a brand-new volunteer who may not have seen our website in depth before and may not be familiar with Natan’s specific teachings.

What do you think, are these procedures useful, or is anything unclear?  If you desired to volunteer for Organic Torah, do you think you’d be able to complete a blog post or a change to a widget just by reading these procedures?  The point of organizational knowledge is for you, me, or anyone to be able to pick up a procedure (that’s explicit knowledge) and do the task, and learn by doing through iteration to become good at the process (that is, to create tacit knowledge in our heads).