> "Is it unambiguous who creates, reviews, and retires it?" ^ownership-clarity ## Resolution > The property of a knowledge artefact having unambiguous answers to who creates it, who reviews it, and who retires it. ^definition Knowledge without ownership rots - no one updates it, no one is on the hook when it goes stale, and no one feels qualified to retire it. Ownership clarity closes that gap. It depends on the system carrying ownership as a first-class field (not folklore) and on the organisation having norms for handing over ownership when a person leaves. Without it, audit trails and attribution become impossible regardless of how rigorous the rest of the system is. ## In practice ```yaml owner: alice@org reviewer: bob@org review-cadence: 90d last-reviewed: 2026-02-15 ``` The artefact carries its ownership as frontmatter. When Alice leaves, the handover is one commit; when the review is overdue, an agent can surface it. ## Discovery questions Customer-facing prompts that surface this attribute being missing, grouped by the pain each probes. ### From [[Standards live in people's heads]] (C) ![[Standards live in people's heads#^discovery-questions]] ### From [[Org knowledge scattered across stores]] (C) ![[Org knowledge scattered across stores#^discovery-questions]] ### From [[KM does not scale]] (C) ![[KM does not scale#^discovery-questions]] ### From [[Artefacts without owner]] (C) ![[Artefacts without owner#^discovery-questions]] ### From [[Knowledge upkeep is nobody's job]] (C) ![[Knowledge upkeep is nobody's job#^discovery-questions]] ### From [[One person holds critical knowledge]] (C) ![[One person holds critical knowledge#^discovery-questions]] ### From [[Reorg lost institutional memory]] (C) ![[Reorg lost institutional memory#^discovery-questions]] ### From [[Sharing knowledge is unrewarded here]] (C) ![[Sharing knowledge is unrewarded here#^discovery-questions]] ### From [[Nobody uses the KM system we built]] (C) ![[Nobody uses the KM system we built#^discovery-questions]] ### From [[Adopted methodology nobody actually follows]] (C) ![[Adopted methodology nobody actually follows#^discovery-questions]]