Module 17 · Lesson 03
Wiki Governance and Training Clients to Maintain Their Own
Reading time: 14 minutes Track: Yungsten Tech Employee Curriculum · Required for all staff
The ownership transfer problem
The most common wiki failure: Yungsten maintains the wiki during the engagement, the engagement ends, nobody on the client side knows how to maintain it, and within six months the wiki is stale and unused.
This failure is our failure, not the client's. Ownership transfer is part of the work, not an afterthought.
The three-phase ownership transfer
Phase 1: Watching (Weeks 1-4)
Yungsten maintains the wiki. The client has read access and is encouraged to use it. They observe how entries are written and updated.
Phase 2: Contributing (Weeks 5-8)
The designated wiki owner starts contributing entries — typically the session notes, since they have first-hand knowledge of what was discussed. Yungsten reviews and provides feedback.
Phase 3: Owning (Weeks 9-12)
The client wiki owner manages the wiki with Yungsten as reviewer. By Week 12, they should be able to add new agent entries, update existing ones, and onboard new team members using only the wiki.
Identifying the wiki owner
The wiki owner needs:
- Regular involvement in the AI initiative
- Comfort with writing (doesn't need to be technical)
- Authority to make updates without multiple approvals
Common good fits: executive assistant, operations manager, department lead. Common bad fit: the most junior person on the team (low authority) or the most senior (too busy to maintain it).
Wiki training for non-technical clients
The wiki training session (30-45 minutes) covers:
- Opening the vault in Obsidian — 5 minutes, hands-on
- Reading an existing entry — what the sections mean, why they're structured this way — 10 minutes
- Creating a new session notes entry — they write it while you watch — 15 minutes
- Adding a simple entry — a new prompt to the library — 10 minutes
- Q&A on maintenance — when to update, who can edit, what to do when something is wrong — 10 minutes
After this session, the client should be able to maintain the wiki independently. Anything more complex than updating session notes and adding prompts should be escalated to Yungsten (for agent entries, CLAUDE.md updates, structural changes).
Governance structure
Establish a simple governance structure before handoff:
Wiki owner: One named person responsible for week-to-week maintenance Update cadence: Weekly for session notes; on-change for everything else Review process: Yungsten reviews structural changes (new sections, major revisions) before they're finalized Escalation: Any question about what should/shouldn't be in the wiki goes to Yungsten
Document this governance in the wiki itself (/00 - Home/Dashboard.md).