Guru Workaround: Adding Cards to Multiple Collections

Note: Scroll midway to see a live example.

• Need: The ability to add Guru cards to multiple collections.

• Why: Knowledge should be accessible wherever it's needed the most. Duplicating cards across collections is an antipattern—you lose your single source of truth and violate the DRY principle (Don't Repeat Yourself).

• Current Workaround: Using iframes to embed Guru cards within other Guru cards (circa JAN 2023). See below.

Note: You can also reference the card in a card by adding a link to it. So long as the card is public and/or that member can access cards in the source card's collection, they can click on it to navigate to it. We don't like context switching—so we just embed it with an iframe.

Embedding Guru Cards within Guru Cards with Iframes

We can use create transclusions of Guru cards within other Guru cards using iframes to avoid duplicating knowledge cards throughout our Guru database.

1. Create your primary source card in the collection where it is most likely to be used and where the need to modify it is most likely to occur.

2. Get the embeddable link of the primary source card you want to transclude into another collection. Paste the link into notepad or something (not Guru) then get the URL referenced within the iframe only.

3. Create a new card in the collection(s) where the information in your primary card is needed. Name the card using whatever naming conventions you adhere to.

4. Add an iframe to the body of the card.

5. Paste the URL you extracted from the iframe embed earlier into the input field under the Enter Iframe URL prompt. Your card should now be embedded.

   1. If it's not working, you likely didn't grab the URL properly.

6. Expand the height of the iframe to display as much of the Guru embed as you see fit.

   1. If it's not working for others who try to view the card later, it's likely they do not have the proper permissions required to view the card. You'll need to add them to either the Collection or the Board or make the card public.

Example

My Exhortation for Guru

Some knowledge is needed for all employees—regardless of role. Some of that knowledge is also used by specific roles in day-to-day operations.

If it were possible to add cards (i.e. multihome) across multiple collections, this wouldn't be a problem. However, Guru does not currently support this critical need.

Some Guru Knowledge Managers are currently creating multiple cards (i.e. duplicates) with the same information to make that knowledge available to employees in the Collections where they need it the most.

The necessity to duplicate information in a knowledge base is absurd.

It violates the very raison d'etre of a knowledge base: to provide people with a single source of truth to important information.

Or, as Guru itself states:

To provide their employees and customers convenient access to important information.

When you have duplicate information throughout a knowledge base, you must rely on additional metadata like last updated, verification status, etc., to know whether you can trust a source of information.

But to do that, you must compare cards to one another. This shouldn't be the responsibility of employees who rely on Guru and thus becomes the responsibility of the knowledge manager—who is just as fallible as everyone else.

Scenario: You update one card with new critical information and forget to update the duplicates throughout your knowledge base. Now imagine how must trust that erodes with leadership in both the efficacy of the knowledge base and the knowledge manager(s).

Result: Churn for Guru increases.