Yes, where would we be as humanity if there weren’t always people who felt the urge to share their knowledge, to make it available to others, without even asking for anything in return?

Of course, not everyone is that idealistic, but they don’t have to be. In a company, the obvious goal is to make a profit, and knowledge is hopefully, like any other part of the company, a consciously maintained and curated resource. At the same time, a lot of knowledge is created within small circles and is only passed on within those circles. It serves to keep that circle alive. But even that requires some kind of motivation, a willingness, or simply a value that people see in it.

This makes me think back to my time as a student at the University of Freiburg, at the small Slavic Studies department and its student association. When I arrived at the university, my impression was that the student association essentially didn’t exist.

For those who don’t know: a student association is the usual framework for students within a department to organize themselves and represent their interests within the department.

Over the course of several years, students gradually built the student association up from practically nothing and established and re-established events for themselves and the other students in the department. These included, above all, orientation week for new students, as well as the summer and winter parties.

There was a hard core of people who always took care of things, and they naturally attracted other students who might not otherwise have taken the initiative themselves. Naturally, this meant that experiences were accumulated and refined from semester to semester.

But, oh dear, the time was approaching when the hard core would leave the department. At some point, student life has to come to an end. And, oh dear, oh dear, it looked as though there would be no new hard core ready to take over the reins and carry on the work of the student association. I didn’t want our work to have been in vain – for us to have rolled the boulder uphill like Sisyphus, only for it to come rolling back down again in the end.

So, to me, it seemed obvious that we should write down the experiences of the previous years, so that they might eventually find their way to motivated people – perhaps only after one, two, or three semesters – who would see it as their responsibility to carry on the old traditions and prevent a break in continuity.

Ironically, the COVID era began shortly afterwards. I had finished my studies, and, to be honest, I don’t know what happened after that. Most likely, the break I had anticipated eventually happened, and the boulder came rolling back down the hill.

Unfortunately, we never finished the documentation either. But I can very well imagine that, by now, there has been someone at the Slavic Studies department who wished they could have found something left behind by their “ancestors.” Perhaps then they wouldn’t have had to start from scratch, but could have built on the experiences of previous generations.

The first thing about knowledge that isn’t written down: eventually, it’s gone – and someone has to start almost from scratch again.

Let us treat documenting as something magical: something that allows us time travel.

What actually happens when we document? People turn an experience into information, give a moment a form, and hold on to something that had only just been unique to that moment. A note. A photo. A set of instructions. A book. A map. Suddenly something bound to a particular person and a particular instant can leave that instant and become reachable for others.

This happens in the large and in the small. Sacred texts outlast their authors. Histories let past events resurface. A researcher writes in a journal. Whether a few lines or whole books, the gesture is the same. Something is meant to remain for others. Knowledge moves from one mind to the next, from one moment to the next, across years or millennia.

Long before anyone called it “documentation”, people were making such time travel possible. Documentation connects two points in time that would otherwise have nothing to do with each other. That is why we can read documentation as an invitation to someone we do not know, or who does not even exist yet. To that someone we can say: this is what I lived, this is what I experienced, this is what I learned, and if you want, you can continue from here.