Here’s a question and answer writeup that I have had squirreled away for a while.

Q: You recently published a book entitled “Conversation and Community“. If you could pick just one thing from your book about interacting with the community, what would it be?

A: I actually blame Whurley and Michael Cote’ for getting me interested in open source communities and wikis for documentation! And by “blame” I mean “thank.” The one thing I’d take away from my book about community is how educational my experiences volunteering as a technical writer for open source projects have been. I feel like I’ve taken a wiki apprenticeship by volunteering with FLOSS Manuals, writing free documentation for free software. I got my wiki feet wet writing for the kids, parents, and teachers using the One Laptop per Child hardware and SugarLabs education platform.

I found that I was interacting with community members and volunteers through the wiki infrastructure itself. For example, we all know how difficult it can be to open the OLPC XO laptop when you first see it closed up. I used an “Art Wanted” wiki page to request simple line drawings showing the opening of the “rabbit ear” latches in a simple step-by-step fashion. In a few weeks’ time, I had links to two images sent to me through my wiki “talk” page from a volunteer that show the two step process for opening the laptop very clearly. This kind of story amazes technical writers who have been working in enterprise environments where a graphic design request wouldn’t have that fast turnaround time.

I also learned that early interactions with people can lead to bigger collaboration opportunities, and that sometimes in-person collaboration is the most efficient. My favorite community event from that experience was the week-long Book Sprint we held in Austin in August 2008. We invited all sorts of recognized community contributors including Walter Bender, one of the founders of the MIT Media Lab. He had written one of the first comments on the discussion for the original simple users guide in the OLPC wiki, pointing out some outdated screenshots. His involvement and helpful attitude led to enormously productive writing sessions at the Book Sprint. Embracing the wiki for authoring led to great results.

Today’s post is from four graduate students from communication and information sciences at Radboud University in the Netherlands.

If you work, or ever worked, with Author-it, RoboHelp, MadCap Flare or Help&Manual, we hope that you are willing to participate in user research. You can participate by responding to all answers in their anonymous online survey: http://www.thesistools.com/?id=123256

Goals for research

The aim of this study is to gain more insight in user-friendliness of functionalities and overall user experiences of the following authoring-tools Author-it, MadCap Flare, Doc-to-Help, Help&Manual or RoboHelp. This study will produce three deliverables:

1. A scientific article
2. Based on the results a matrix will be created, depicting for each authoring-tool a clear overview of its functionalities and its associated user friendliness score
3. A more practical report with recommendations

In case you are interested in this survey’s results, the survey gives you the opportunity to leave your e-mail address. We will send you the results as soon as they are available.

Participation

Filling in the survey will take approximately 15 minutes. The survey consists of closed questions, two semi-open question and one open question, all asking about your opinion.

This research is conducted by four Master students from the faculty communication-and information sciences, Radboud University, the Netherlands.

Thank you in advance for participating in this survey!

Kind regards, Suzanne van den Berg, Nanette Hogervorst, Relus Kuijpers, Anne Rolsma

I’m reading (with vigor!) the The State of Community Management Report: Best Practices from Community Practitioners
from the Community Roundtable, and finding so many wonderful tips about content from people who are community managers. I had to start a list of items that are relevant to technical communication and web writing to share. I naturally tend to target technical communications when I interpret the report, but this report is rife with content strategy.

I agree with this statement, and I think it means a positive impact on technical writers and web writers who are paid to create content by businesses.

The percentage of content that is desirable and
feasible to be formally produced versus community-generated
will have a big impact on resource and
budget planning. This aspect is likely to change – often
dramatically – over time, although it should not be
assumed that content should ever be exclusively
community-generated.

I personally haven’t found that completely community-generated documentation will serve most business goals. In the case of FLOSS Manuals, though, the community-generated content meets the main purpose of supporting and documenting  open source software. Still, hiring professional writers makes sense when you need to create content that meets very specific goals for a community, whether your goals are raising awareness, troubleshooting, or learning.

Now, this particular comment puts a bit of a stake in the heart of technical communication’s beloved single sourcing. I like the idea of associated content for technical writers to create. It’s branching into new media, such as audio or video, while still valuing the technical content that you work so hard to create. It’s not that one births the other, but rather the two types can compliment each other.

Instead of directly repurposing content from one format to another, create
associated content. For example, instead of turning a white paper into an
audio transcript, create a podcast discussion about it with the author.

Another line that causes me to press pause and ponder for a bit:

People seldom form relationships with text alone.

Instead, offer images, video, or music as part of the user experience in order to grow relationships. Fascinating.

And finally, the one that might be the toughest for professional writers, copy editors, and technical communicators to accept:

Learn to accept imperfection. Concentrate on making content interesting
and relevant rather than perfect. Imperfection actually allows community
members to better relate to it and engage with it.

And with striving towards imperfection as my excuse, I’ll close out this blog entry and encourage you to read the report for yourself, drawing your own arrows from the quiver and targeting what is important to you.

I can’t help but admire the design of Google’s Conversion University for learning Google Analytics. They’ve built presentations with voiceovers that alternate between a male narrator and a female narrator. Most lessons are about 3 minutes to 7 minutes long, and I am learning as I go in a pace that I set.

For each lesson you can read what you’ll learn ahead of time, and after you click through to the video presentation, you get enough text explanations that both the visual/textual and auditory learner is well served.

I am taking these lessons to prepare for the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ) test. It is a 90 minute test that costs $50 to take, and you earn an individual certification. You can either take the Analytics test or the AdWords test. And in true Google style, you can search for people who have gotten their certifications.

I got through First Steps the first evening, and nearly all the way through Interpreting Reports in another couple of hours. I agree that it helps to already be using Google Analytics so you can switch over to your reports immediately after viewing a lesson. You can also use what you learn immediately by applying it to your own questions about your site.

You can also view videos on YouTube that show examples, such as interpreting and acting on your data.

Wish me luck! You can read Frequently Asked Questions about Google Analytics IQ if you want to learn more.

I’ve put together a Facebook page for my book, Conversation and Community. I’ve had requests for a place for people to talk about the ideas in the book, and after talking it over with others, I settled on Facebook as a good place to bring together all the different sorts of communicators who have found my book helpful. From a pastor in Michigan to a small business on the west coat, to all the technical communicators who have found it useful, let’s gather together to socialize and talk about this shift towards enhanced social communication techniques.

For this month’s Central Texas DITA User Group meeting we played host to Eliot Kimber. I took some scattered notes, mostly jotting down the great phrases Eliot handed out while nodding and chuckling.

He’ll be doing this presentation as a webinar for Really Strategies, Inc. on March 10th, and you can sign up on the Really Strategies website.

Eliot is explaining why DITA makes sense for publishing outside of tech comm – because most all publishers need to get ePub out of their legacy content. NEED.

DITA should take over everything – Eliot has an evil plan. He tries not to put his pinky to his chin, though. He uses strong statements, though, like:

“No reason to choose any other XML standard but DITA.”

DITA for Publishers is built on/with/using:

• Topic types: article, chapter, subsection, sidebar, part
• Map domain: pubmap
• MS Word to DITA framework – XSLT-based framework
• ePub transform for Open Toolkit
• Pubmamp support for PDF transform, which enables creating quick drafts for review while people offshore the XML-izing of the content

Example of just how exacting and demanding editors at publishers can be: Quark to Indesign migration blocker (years ago) was that a particular hyphen character wasn’t automatic with Indesign.

Eliot on publishers deciding to go with XML: “If they’re really lucky, they have an IT group that won’t help them with decisions on XML solutions.”

What Publishers need that DITA brings: (bold emphasis mine)

• Low cost of entry for sophisticated XML solutions
• Blind interchange of content
• Flexible markup design
• Strong support for modularity and reuse
• Wide support by free and commercial tools

He got tired of reinventing the same thing over and over – DITA for Publishers makes his implementation job easier – more clients farther along a path of success.

Doesn’t DITA require modular writing?
- No

Most people implementing DITA have one topic, one file – but that is not necessary – he could have an entire book as a single XML document with one root “topic.”

Who’s using DITA for Publishers?
- ASTD is using it for their publishing of books and magazines
- Upper Room – Methodist church – publishing arm of major No. American church for books and magazines
- Publisher of test preparation manuals – including TAKS test – using learning and training specializations for test questions as well
- Any Really Strategies client who doesn’t already have schemas (or who is willing to migrate to a DITA-based solution)
He usually can get at least one output that they can’t currently get out of their current XML schemas

Publications are very simple – except when they’re not. One differentiator that publishers can use is the design of the book – unique, attention-getting designs are valued.

DITA enables iterative design and development – when you come across something more sophisticated than the “norm” you just keep adding features – and interchange is always ensured.

Map / Content distinction is essential – chapter, sections, subsections, but publication structures can be very complicated with appendices, glossaries, indexes. Maps can impose the semantic meaning within the context of a map structure. So you may have one kind of division element, but 18 kinds of topic reference (yow, but that makes sense.) Means he can convert easier to generic topics, but add sophistication through the map.

Lots of publishing content is highly modular -

examples:
magazine articles – reusable, valuable, can send through email, post to web
encyclopedias
travel and nature guides – can be recombined in interesting ways to provide additional value – also batch consistency over a large number of pubs makes sense (automated composition is a-okay)
Dictionaries
Newspapers
Sidebars – by its nature it’s a standalone thing
Educational materials such as textbooks
Standards – people make money publishing info about accounting standards, for example

Business rules apply to element types in their CMS – so there’s a practical aspect to article, chapter, subsection, sidebar and their nesting

Bookmap is way too limited for technical manuals that don’t conform to IBM standards

Bookmap doesn’t give publishers what they need, so he built a publication map domain – provides more structuring options, more licensing options (nothing to do with copyright), he can also mix it in with other map domains, e.g. learningMap

structural module vs domain module – you can pick and choose in a domain module the things that are specifically useful

Provides publishing-specific structures, such as “page” – can have a topic with an empty title element

Publishing domains:
+ Formatting domain
- supports capturing of arbitrary formatting (example: 9th grade biology text book – lots of nutty formatting)
- Integrates MathML
-Can embed raw InDesign interchange data
+ Pub content domain – elements contained in typical publications, e.g. epigram
+ Verse domain: markup for poetry
+ Classification domain: container for classifying metadata (specific taxonomy, Upper Room has this for all the ways their content relates to the domain of spiritual “stuff” he used a DITA map for the taxonomy)

General purpose Docx to DITA XSLT transform – authors are writing magazine articles in Word and then submitting. Transform configured by separate style-to-tag mapping. Everything from magazine articles to entire course scripts, all with different configuration parameters. Must have consistently tagged styles in the Word document.

XML-first workflows are pretty rare in the publishing industry among publishers.

Too much variablity in the business process – eight different biz processes through which they get books to publish at an association, for example.

Typify can “remember” where things came from and automate composition, but it costs a bunch.

DITA to InCopy generates InCopy articles from DITA topics – InCopy is used for manuscript preparation (writing with no layout).

The ePub open toolkit plugin generates HTML-based ePub packages from maps
Uses output of the base XHTML transformation type

What he wants to continue after DITA 1.2 is done:
- Documentation of vocabulary modules
- Refinement and extension of tools an infrastructure

Community of DITA for Publishers users is building – he wants to propose it as a DITA Subcommittee once he gets enough community behind it.

I’m late to write up my thoughts on Gordon Mclean’s post, Strange Bias, but I give him a belated thumbs up for great self-inspection and data query in the post.

My take? I read ““Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants” on Copyblogger in December. It’s a great survivor story that you should read in its entirety, but the gist of it is that James is a pen name for a woman freelance writer, who writes the popular blog Men with Pens. Merely representing herself as a man made a real difference in her career trajectory. I was shocked, though, that she never had to talk to clients on the phone and that she never went to conferences or spoke at conferences.

It made me wonder if I’d have 10 times the subscribers to my blog if I had started in 2005 as Tom Gentle. It really did. But we are who we are, and being genuine and transparent is all part of my blogging experience. Many of the opportunities I’ve had in the past 4-5 years are somehow related to my blog and the work ethic it requires to maintain.

And to answer Gordon’s question, “is it just me?” I’d say, my experience with tech pub teams I’ve been on are that men are the slightly minority gender. If you believe Quantcast web stats about the STC website, you see that 61% of site visitors are female. I’ve also observed more women at tech comm conferences than men.

But, socializing being, well, social, means you tend to relate to people like yourself, right? So followers, friends, and fans, being self-selecting as they are, may prove that men follow men and women follow women. I think Twitter certainly reflects this tendency, since research shows men follow men on Twitter. And bloggers use Twitter far more than the general population (See the pie chart on the Day 5 report).

If you read Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere you see that 2/3 rds of all bloggers are men. So the 55% blogs written by men that Gordon reads actually differs from the predictive 66% overall population. A great observation, Gordon, well done.

I’ve been given a 20-minute book reading opportunity at SXSWi! I’ve been to SXSW Interactive at least three times over the past five years, and I’m a huge fan of the conference. So, when I saw an email in my inbox from Hugh Forrest, the organizer, I ran around my (home) office with glee!

Here’s a description of the reading, which is scheduled for Tuesday, March 16th at 12:30.

A reading by the author of Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. This book brings together the worlds of technical communication and social media. It shows how technical communicators can effectively use social media, and describes why quality technical content is essential to a successful social media strategy.

You can add it to your schedule using this link. I’d love to meet you there, and would love your suggestions for what to read from my book. I’m just amazed to have this opportunity and can’t wait to hear questions and comments about the social web for documentation.

I’ve published a long-ish article on the WritersUA site where I describe techniques for user assistance that let the user participate. It starts with simple techniques such as comments and moves towards community documentation efforts. Please read and share Putting the User in User Assistance. I’d love to hear what you think about these techniques.

Wow, Pepsi is not going to air an advertisement during the Super Bowl for the first time in 23 years, according to the Financial Times. They say, “With a major digital campaign that features its own website and a heavy presence on Facebook, PepsiCo is betting that a more interactive approach will resonate with consumers in the always-on age of social networking sites.”

So, Pepsi is willing to give up an expensive ad campaign and forgo celebrities for everyday people. What are you willing to give up from your traditional technical communication deliverables? With whom will you collaborate to make this shift happen?

Two Sun Microsystems technical writers wrestled with the same issues, trading time and effort for the payoff. They had surveyed their audience and found that they wanted screencasts, overviews, and tutorials. They rolled up their sleeves and ruthlessly slashed the “Duh” material from their traditional docs. Readers still wanted books to learn at their own pace, but they also wanted new media to enhance their learning experience.

Josh Bernoff just posted a new survey tool to help people understand what they are facing when embarking in new media territory – is that iPhone app idea worthwhile? Should we be taking on another social platform? From his post, he states, “It’s not just the value for customers that’s in question, and it’s not just the technical effort. It’s the political effort — all the people who have a stake and try to stop you or help you (or “help” you).”

We all have to analyze the value and effort and payoff. It’s great to have a survey tool that will help you navigate the waters.