Well - as mentioned, we had our collaboration meeting about this, and are planning more this week.
Each person has their own preference, and most start with pen & paper notes. Many are using OneNote and some prefer MS Word. And although sharing their info is not high on the list of priorities,
planning to share definitely improves the quality and organization of the technical info!
After taking notes on paper, we decide whether to 'write-them-up' or not based on whether it is worth sharing or not. People don't tend to convert their paper notes to digital unless it is going to be shared, and this is where the tech comes in along with some discipline as follows:
When you handwrite a note or make a quick copy of something, make sure it has enough context so you can remember what it was for in 60 days time!
When you return to it (within a week or so) and decide to write-it-up in your app of choice then you can add more, like an image or icon to anchor the association. Pictures really help with recall. Also when cleaning up a note try to combine it with another or reference another to tie it into your collection.
Each time you add new stuff to your digital knowledgebase is an opportunity to create, merge or remove the
categories you may have created in your knowledgebase. But this only works if the tool you are using has effective tagging or grouping features. Categories are usually implied by your folder & file naming conventions
E.g. in OneNote you have the following choices: the
notebook name, the
section names in the notebook - which are like folders, optional sub-section names, and then the actual
pages names in the sections. These make up the obvious hierarchy of categories. The temptation is to make new categories for everything, but I find it is best to only make new ones when I have 3 or more related items. I also tend to use one page per note and try (but often fail) to keep it to one screen-full to avoid the need to scroll down to find something.
We still need to decide on how to classify tech info. The search for effective categorization of technical knowledge continues. (There is a 216 page PDF on the 'Taxonomy of Education Objectives' by Bloom - but that may be for another day :). Talking of search - why bother with section and pages if you can just do a global search of your notes? Well, the hit results in OneNote are listed by Page name within section names, so you still need a useful naming convention.
If you want to share how you classify your tech info (especially if it is about Rocket Software Products) - then please do because you could have a system which can help us all.
Below is what I use in one of my dumping-group OneNote notebooks (COLLECTION is my default initial capture section)- I also have a sub-section for pages on each Rocket product, which is a very basic level of categorization.