How to deal with these Processes for a Small Team and Implement these Ideas
No matter what size the team is, motivation to actually start thinking about these processes is really hard to start as a movement. One way of getting people motivated is to show them other people's documentation, (such as INN) and think about all the things in your job that you repeat and do on a daily basis. If you tell people they can save time in the long run if they just spend one or two days really thinking through what documentation would be helpful for the newsroom to have, it can also be a motivation.
People like rewards and getting told they are doing good work. If you're writing good documentation and share it on Github and showcase that you're a newsroom that really cares about the future of the newsroom and how institutional knowledge will be handled, you could also be seen by other newsrooms as an example. In the case of INN, Schweigert noted that their guide has been helpful when they're recruiting or talking to people about what they do on a daily basis in their job.
In a small newsroom, set up a meeting with the higher-up editors. Explain why documentation should be a priority and why making these processes for on-boarding and off-boarding are really important in keeping everyone in the newsroom on the same page. Take the checklist in this guide and personalize it for your newsroom.
The push for documentation should begin at the editors' level so that everyone knows that documentation is priority and should be done as a normal part of one's daily workflow. One way reporters can get started with making this a part of their workflow is spending fifteen minutes at the end of every day updating contact files and notes on what they worked on during that day. It may not be important to include all the notes one takes in the final documentation for one's job, but it can be really helpful to get into the mindset of writing down documentation. If not daily, even weekly documentation, for example, on Fridays could work too.
If you're on a team of two people or you're not on a team at all, find someone in the newsroom that can read through your documentation and be your buddy. You read their documentation and add to it and they can read yours and add to it. For those lone developers or data reporters, having someone who does not have a technical background that can read through the documentation and add to it can also add a new perspective to your documentation and way you think about your work.