Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation is a strategic guide to integrating social media methods with user assistance and technical documentation, though it helps all types of writers understand uses for social networking and social media in content creation. It helps your content and methods be practical and innovative at the same time. Here are the contents of the book:
Chapter 1: Towards the Future of Documentation
Learn how writing has been influenced by the social web and reasons for moving content towards conversation.
Chapter 2: Defining a Writer’s Role with the Social Web
Grapple with the challenges and opportunities by building a strategic plan for conversation and community integration.
Chapter 3: Community and Documentation (Available as a free download!)
Find out how to motivate contributors and encourage and grow community efforts, including book sprints.
Chapter 4: Commenting and Connecting with Users
Listen first, then take the steps towards integrating users in your user assistance. Evaluate commenting systems prior to implementation.
Chapter 5: Wikis as Documentation Systems
Start or reinvigorate a wiki with examples and an interview as well as innovative ideas and alternatives when a wiki is not the right match.
Chapter 6: Finding your Voice
Design a style guide and create publishing strategies to help you live and work with conversational content that’s geared towards community sharing.
Chapter 7. Content Strategy for Community Documentation
Understand the community dynamics along with your content strategy best practices.
Chapter 8. Analyzing and Measuring Web Techniques
Look for ways to know if your content is performing well and engaging the community.
Chapter 9. Open Source Documentation
Learn about the unique nature of open source documentation from multiple practitioners in the field.
Appendix A. Concepts and Tools of the Social Web
Understand social media tools and which selections affect which types of content.
Appendix B. Easter Seals Internet Public Discourse Policy
Get a glimpse into an organization’s social web policy for both employees and public volunteers.
Appendix C. Managing Content for Continuous Learning at Autodesk
Learn about flowing structured content such as DITA XML into a social web platform like Mindtouch.