All that to say, your online community may already have 1% participation and if so, you’re doing well… and really, from what you describe, you’re doing great! Getting those corner cases, nice thought-piece articles, that’ll come with time I bet!

The site met a lot of goals. We made learning What’s New like watching TV. As such, we engaged internal audiences and beta customers who in the past had been too busy or detached to participate in development. Comments made feedback quick and specific.

The whole company rallied around the project. Marketing added the Flash banner, and promoted it in release announcements. Documentation actually became a focal point of the release.

All very good.

But I also had a larger vision: a feature description should be interesting and digestable. Then comments would include voices of Support, R&D, VCs, and eventually customers, providing think pieces, corner case details, ideas about how a specific customer might use a feature, etc.

That’s where I failed. Nobody quite got why I wouldn’t just add more documentation. And I don’t quite get why they couldn’t see it.

Hm. Writing this has given me some ideas. But I’d like to know how you handle adoption issues like these too.

BTW, even though I whine about adoption, we’re not terribly stuck. We’re thinking about a wiki for a project. And the new owners, PTC, are all about DITA, as you might guess.

@Cat – I love hearing what you’re up to – or up against? Your cocreate2008.com IS way cool. I’d love to hear more about its goals and what community surrounds it? You might just need the right community convinced?

Takes me right back to the relinquishing control post. In the end, I still feel like we have to pull along most of the people with whom I most want to dialog.

At work, we introduced blogumentation with our new release this week. It’s basically an online What’s New, with embedded video and all (www.cocreate2008.com –it’s way cool).

We put it on a blog engine. It was great for transparency and interaction during development. But by release we had to disable comments and give up most of our visions of having a real conversation with customers via the blog. Largely because I failed to spread the vision convincingly. Or maybe the time just isn’t right yet.

It all begs another question: How visionary should technical writers be? How far in the future do we really want to look? Are we helping? Or are we just annoying our bosses because we always want to do the next big thing?

Okay. I’ll shut up. Just remember, I ramble because you get me thinking

I find it interesting because people are more likely to say positive things in Tweets, unlike forums where people tend to ask technical questions or discuss problems. Comments like “Loving Oxygen 9.2 DITA support. almost renders XMetaL obsolete.”

David – @seemsArtless on Twitter