I think Slack’s got an opportunity here to displace Confluence as the “system of record” for work documents. Their Canvas editor is quite good, much better than Confluence’s, and it’s one I really like using. Yet once a Canvas is written and published, they’re ridiculously hard to find again.
Having a central place to browse Canvases and arrange them into categories, much like someone would do in a wiki, would go a long way to making them useful as documents unto themselves, rather than simply “big messages” with short-to-medium-term lifespans.
That’s not to say there’s not a role for such documents. In fact, I wonder if that’s why wikis are always difficult to navigate: you’re mixing documents that have different expected lifespans. System designs sit alongside retrospectives from 2022, which sit alongside the agenda for a meeting next week.
Here Canvases in Slack could be created with the default expectation that the lifespan will be a couple or weeks, or a month, and it’s only those that you explicitly “keep” that would be browsable in this new system. These are the ones you expect to last years and be always kept up to date. The others will still be there — Slack can archive them — but they’ll slowly fade into the background much like the message history.
Anyway, just some random thoughts I had while starting to work on a design within a Canvas and wondering if it should actually go into Confluence.