Built-in help with an assistant that answers

The knowledge nobody wrote down sits with two people

In most associations the treasurer knows how the membership-fee run is set up, and the chair knows where the minutes belong. It is written down nowhere. When one of them steps down, or when new volunteers arrive after the general meeting, the handover starts over as a conversation over coffee, and the same questions come round again the following year.

The help inside the platform is written so it does not have to work that way. The whole platform is documented in a wiki that lives inside the platform itself, open to anyone who is signed in. That includes a member still waiting to be approved: they are exactly the person who needs to read how it all fits together.

A wiki about the platform, not a generic help page

The wiki is split into an overview, a section per area, the workflows and a reference, and every article carries its own table of contents. It describes how members, fees, activities, board work and the rest actually behave in practice, not just what the features are called.

Every product article is listed, including the ones about administrator screens. That is deliberate: showing a volunteer only what she can open herself makes the platform look smaller than it is, and she never discovers that the thing she is missing exists and simply needs a role.

Ask instead of hunting

On top of the wiki sits an assistant that answers questions asked in plain language. “How do I correct a mistake on a membership invoice?” The assistant finds the passages in the wiki that deal with it and writes an answer from them, in the language the question was asked in.

The answer arrives with the passages it was built from, so it can be checked, and with a link on to the article or the screen you need. When the wiki does not cover the question, the assistant says so plainly rather than guessing. It will not invent a procedure that does not exist.

The help knows which screen you are on

Help opens from any page in the platform, and it knows where you are and which field you are filling in. So the question “what goes here?” makes sense without you having to explain the context first.

When the assistant suggests going somewhere else, it only offers pages that exist, and only when your role allows it. If the screen needs a permission you do not have, you are told so instead of being sent to a locked door. That is the kind of detail that decides whether the help gets used a second time.

Your own rules are a different assistant

This assistant answers questions about the platform. For answers from your association's own articles of association, standing orders and rules, that is the rule assistant, which reads your own documents and points to the clause.

The two feel alike to use and differ in what they have read. Worth keeping apart: how to set up a vote belongs here, while how many days before the general meeting the notice must go out belongs in your own rulebook.