Here are my notes from Darren Barefoot’s talk, a self-described recovering technical writer.
He leads with what defines social media? Create your own definition around these concepts:
Conversation - comments on large media sites allow ayone to speak to the media person keeping on the pedestal
Collaboration - 7 million people collaborating on wikipedia, likely the largest collaboration in human history
Sharing - some sort of microbroadcasting is built into every type of website
Scope - there are no longer 42-minute hours on televisions. Your buckets of stuff and time are sliced and diced. Ebooks can be 10 pages to 1000 pages.
Community - constructing affinity groups is easy, accessible
Transparency - blogging encourages transparency - medium is the message
Authenticity - example of knowing it’s fake is fakeSteveJobs.com, Lonelygirl15 is an example of outed fakery
42% of Chinese internet users have a blog
“The people formerly known as the audience”
Survey of 1200 bloggers - why do you create content, do social media? Talk to friends and family first, Keep personal history, Emote top three. But make money bottom response.
An excellent, engaging talk, with the conclusion being, there’s no way to relinquish control, it is already too late.
Here are the takeaways he left us with:
Relinquish control - realize that the best documentation for your product is already not on your website.
Users will help each other - put screenshots in Flickr to make it easy for your users to grab them and use them in their own doc
Empower your most passionate users - for example, the Red Room Chronicles created by a Marriot business traveller. He must be the most passionate hotel user known. Offer those users previews, invite them to focus groups, make them feel special.
Think outside the page - Twitter troubleshooting tips, and of course, remember video and photos.
Go where your users are - find their community spaces, be present as needed.
While gearing up for different conference trips and presentations, I’ve been trying to get to know collaborators using asynchronous communications, such as listening to Char James-Tanny’s podcast on techwritervoices.com. She presented “Virtual Ways of Communicating” at a Florida STC meeting and Tom Johnson recorded it and posted it later.
I really enjoyed not only listening to Char speak but also hear the audience questions and interactions. For example, when she showed tag clouds, one audience member asked, does the size and format of the tag words change when a tag is used more often than another? And I thought, wow, I’ve always assumed that is exactly how it works, but haven’t actually asked the question, such as refresh rate or what relative sizing means. It points out to me that I take a lot for granted in the Web 2.0 world due to observing so much of it so often. But, a new fresh perspective offers me the conceptual details that people would seek when first exposed to something like a tag cloud.
As part of listening to this podcast, I found many suggestions for cool videos, popular wikis, and new uses of RSS such as RSS that I hadn’t heard yet. I realize that no matter how hard I try to keep up, there are new applications of technology coming in every day. I thought I’d collect these together though as a nice collection of “have you seen this?” which may not make much sense unless you listen to the podcast, but these were enjoyable to hear about and explore on my own.
I just put the finishing touches on our Wiki Roundtripping presentation and I have to admit I’m a little excited about it. While much of the focus will be on the DITA-Wiki Hybrid scenarios, there are at least two new scenarios that I’ve learned about since writing that white paper that we’ll bring to the presentation.
The Meet the Bloggers session is apparently going to be popular, so I hope I can pull off the moderator role effectively. I’m no Oprah, but I do come from Cincinnati where Jerry Springer was once mayor. This session will be fun and I expect to learn from Tom Johnson, Scott Abel, Darren Barefoot, Scott Nesbitt, and Aaron Davis.
Plus, I’m excited for the Unconference sessions Wednesday night. Completely experimental, but this conference seems like a great place to try out some different ways of sharing information off-the-cuff and informally.
I’ve listened to about the first 45 minutes of Clay Shirky’s talk on “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations.” http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2008/02/shirky. Well worth the time spent – especially for my current employer’s product set, which enables organizations to manage their data used to communicate with and connect their members with each other through event planning - all the goals that associations and non-profits strive for every day.
Before the web, it would have easily taken five to seven years to build up the community - starting from the time when a professional photographer figured out the technique, to the time when ordinary people having the knowledge to accomplish HDR. Using Flickr, it took three months to build a community of practice, because when a photo goes up, people talk with each other, ask how photos were done, and examine the photo examples to learn. In this case, the technology became a platform where people help one another get better.
This group has no commercial incentive whatsoever, as a side note.
The community is as important as the content, a humbling thought for us writers. Just like the Architecture of Participation that Tim O’Reilly talked about in 2004, the participation of community members to generate and test content is as key as the content itself. He even states, “the fundamental architecture of hyperlinking ensures that the value of the web is created by its users.” Google Page Rank further adds to the value by including inbound links in its ranking algorithm.
15% of people are from the northeast 15% of people left handed 15% of people in the world have no cell phone, or no Internet
And… less than 15% of computer science majors are female. [1]
This was the lead-in for the panelists and I liked the tie-ins of 15.
Since this session, I have talked to girls around the 12-15 year old range, and I completely agree with all the panelist’s observations about how girls don’t think they’re good at something, especially computers.
In this session I met Ashe Dryden and we talked about BarCamp Austin - she’s an organizer for BarCamp Milwaukee. I asked her to watch my laptop while I got a “pop” and offered to get her one too. I laughed when she asked upon my return, “Where are you from, if you say ‘pop!’” I have lived in Austin seven years, but haven’t let go of my Midwestern roots (Indiana and Ohio), where we say pop for all kinds of soda, pop, soda pop, Coke, and fizzy drink.
After the session I spoke to Clare Richardson of GirlStart about how the Austin XO user group would like to help out with their projects. One that’s upcoming is the Take IT Global showcase, where they’re working on games for the OLPC project. It sounds like they have enough XOs for their upcoming event, April 26th, which I plan to attend. They’re going to show off the educational game projects that the girls in the GirlStart program have been programming. They’re using a wiki to keep notes, collaborate, do project planning, all for the work they’re doing on their games. It’s great fun to read the game ideas.
Here are my notes from the session.
Clare Richardson - GirlStart in Austin, TX
What class in middle school did you feel smart and confident in?
art, phys ed, math, computer lab?
TechBridge
Free afterschool programs and summer programs.
Role models are key, role model training. Great training document available on their website. I plan to read through it for ideas on taking the XO to classrooms.
Jay Moore MentorNet
Email connection with mentors, 10-15 minutes a week.
Abby Tittizer IBM Extreme Blue
Internship program, not specific to women, for college students.
Q: What are the common misconceptions about girls and technology and getting them interested?
A: Perception is boring and nerdy and you have to already be good at it. Girls have altruistic missions.
Girls don’t think they’re qualified to do something, but boys “just go for it.” girls think that an internship means they already need to know how to do it.
Suggestions:
Have girls sign up in pairs for a computer class.
Spend time with your kids teachers and guidance counselors to find out more about their science education, etc.
Boys tend to have an inflated sense of their own competence.
UT has a club that has a roadshow that goes out to TX high schools to help recruit.
They use pair programming in introductory classes.
Updated to add: There’s a great article in the NYTimes that I found through Anne Zelenka’s del.icio.us links called “Sorry, Boys, This is our Domain.” While girls might not be computer science majors, they are excellent bloggers and customizers of all sorts of web and social sites. Quote: “…a study published in December by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that among Web users ages 12 to 17, significantly more girls than boys blog (35 percent of girls compared with 20 percent of boys) and create or work on their own Web pages (32 percent of girls compared with 22 percent of boys).” Girls may have more patience and perseverance to stick to a site that requires content updates.
I’m pleased that the Building a DITA-Wiki Hybrid article that I co-authored with Lisa Dyer and Michael Priestly is available online for free to anyone, STC member or non-member. The article discusses these three ideas for merging DITA and wiki technologies:
DITA Storm, an online DITA editor with an edit button on each page. While it’s not quite a DITA wiki, it seems like it could become one with some RSS notification and comment or discussion ability on each page.
Wikislices are a cross-section of a wiki such as Wikipedia, currently created with school curriculum in mind. Michael Priestly and I are working on a team to find ways to use DITA maps to manage and build wikislices.
Alan Porter’s presentation at the Central Texas DITA User Group meeting talked about Quadralay’s use of wikis internally and their external wiki at wiki.webworks.com.
They have four wikis in operation right now, with one more to come. Back in 2003, they started their first wiki for the development team. Their company is a small one, based in Austin, and they now have absolutely every employee (with the exception of one person) having contributed to the wiki at some point or another. Currently, with their staff of 15 people, half of them contribute several times a week.
They held a brown bag training session for the whole company when a wiki for the company came out, to help people get comfortable with editing.
At their WebWorks RoundUp user forum last year, they demonstrated a proof of concept that they could take a mix of FrameMaker, DITA-XML and Word source and turn it into wiki text. I was at the demo and it has such a nice “cool” factor even if it was a simple Proof of Concept (PoC).
Another case study - they use their wiki to communicate with clients and customers on the bid and contract process, and people say it makes things go so smoothly with great communication. They use the very secure MoinMoin wiki engine and it is locked down with tight controls.
The WebWorks Services wiki:
used to create and track task tickets
offers single point of contact
facilitates interaction between customers and engineers
gives a timeline for edits on a page
gives them milestones and percent completion
In the next six months or so, they’re planning on a new doc site, docs.webworks.com (not yet live) to be authored in DITA using structured FrameMaker, then published to wikitext using WebWorks.
This book was an easy, fun, read, and seemed especially pertinent after all the immersion into social networking I’ve been doing with SXSW Interactive. The 100-page book, Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook, is aimed at your company’s marketing department for them to read before deep-diving into the social media landscape. Julie Szabo and Darren Barefoot share their stories and even their somewhat embarrassing lessons learned, sparing you from the same fate while also encouraging you to start the conversation.
At talk.bmc our entire intent was to start the conversation. So I know how daunting and intimidating it can be, yet you also have to dive in and sit back and listen. It’s not an easy road to walk. But sometimes ROI stands for Risk of Inaction, so eventually you should learn your way around the tools of the trade. I still like Reach Or Influence for the ROI acronym when applied to blogging.
This book gives you specific examples of tools and technology you can use to start the conversation, and also has the proper amount of caution about being genuine and having good intentions. One of my favorite quotes:
The vast majority of products are
ordinary. Worse, most customers
have made their buying decisions
about staple purchases years ago,
and it’s difficult to change their
minds.
So, what to do? Pull off the “online equivalent of a publicity stunt,” create a meme. To me, this is such a daunting task I can’t imagine writing a book about how to do it. But sure enough, these two have the experience and case studies to show for it.
I also liked the “influencer” chapter, describing the rules for interaction with bloggers. Looking at it as a blogger rather than a marketer, it’s good insider information to have. For example, check out this trick! Let’s say someone has a feedburner feed, but they haven’t published that little graphic that shows how many subscribers they have. Just insert /~fc/ into their feedburner URL, and voila, you have the little graphic! Example: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/JustWriteClick. Super secret way to check out your friend’s blogs and see if they have any subscribers to speak of.
Glory be, they like their technical writers as monitors!
Darren has a background as a technical writer, and when the book talks about who is a good candidate for the sometimes time-consuming task of monitoring the blogosphere, I’ll bet it’s Darren who’s giving the nod to the technical writer. My other favorite quote:
On the development side, technical support engineers
or technical writers are often a good choice. They’re good
communicators, tend to have a broad awareness of the
company’s products, and can even reply to basic
support-related posts.
I agree whole heartedly. I think the Agile technical writer that Sarah Maddox describes is precisely the right person to be identifying keywords, get RSS watch lists configured, and read, read, read, and respond when necessary or find someone in our company who can respond correctly.
Wikipedia doesn’t like marketers - tread carefully
And, my personal favorite topic, wikis, is addressed. The book has an excellent section about what to do and what not to do when it comes to the tricky waters of Wikipedia. To me, this section alone is worth the $29 for this book! Solid advice with the proper amount of respect for the community behind Wikipedia.
All in all, nicely done and a great read for marketers and bloggers alike.
Eager to get started with the four days of SouthBy goodness, I got off work Friday afternoon a little early, having headed in a little early, and made it downtown in time to wait in a line a half a block long for my SXSW Interactive badge complete with my photo. I only needed a half hour to get through the line, though. For the first time ever I made it to the very first SXSWi session, having to choose between Edit Me: How Gamers are Adopting the Wiki Way, and Career Rev 342: Dabble Dabble, Toil and Kick Ass. Come on, what would you choose?
The wiki talk won out, and I was happy to sit in the back and take notes in my moleskine notebook. Here they are, my notes transcribed from my handwriting, after listening to these panelists. You can listen to them also, as the podcasts are already available.
Angelique SheltonGM of Wikia Gaming, Wikia Inc - A collection of freely-hosted ad-supported wiki communities using the Open Source MediaWiki software. April BurbaCommunity Mgr, NCsoft - Game software publisher George PribulLead Admin, WowWiki.com Jake McKee, moderatorChief Ant Wrangler, Ant’s Eye View
Wiki way - gamers community - wowwiki.com World Of Warcraft wiki
“People are stronger than the game.”
People devoting time to their product is more valuable than money (because the money will follow, I guess) and because it makes the developers motivated and excited - passion.
Wikia has 6000-7000 communities. Wow.
Why write content for free? NBA Analogy - pick up games in the street are everywhere, they are playing for social status. Same thing with the wiki status - social currency is valuable in the gaming community and other communities. I especially like this analogy because it means I’m like a pro basketball player but I play pick up games when I write on wikis other than my employers.
Q: What happens when or if the social status in the game collides with the social aspect of the wiki?
A: It happens all the time - the panelist met his girlfriend on the wiki but also played the game with her. Both areas contribute to social status. You can now browse the Internet while you play with side-by-side windows. Lets the wiki be viewed or even edited while playing the game. Wow. In the MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) game industry, they have seamless interaction between web and the game. XML feeds for character sets and everything already supplied.
Q: What’s the best scenario - when do you (the company) create a wiki, or are you better off letting the community start and run with it?
A: NCSoft decided to let users run their own wiki, citing concern about risk, but offered network hosting, “helping the community help themselves” - ended up making one wiki. Let the community moderate/arbitrate it - thinking they’ll take care of “griefers.”
Q: What about guilds in the game publishing in correct data to mess up other guilds?
A: Wowwiki does not allow anonymous editing, so this isn’t easy to do, although they have seen it attempted but it’s usually futile.
Q: Are published strategy guides losing money because of the wiki? Is there any IP conflict? Sicne Wikia is ad-based, how does it cut into game book revenue? A: Absolutely not, since publishing “freezes” the content, and Walmart is the only one making any “real” money on the product. There’s not enough money to be made on strategy guides. Books on strategy tend to be read in the bathroom (says a panelist), having a passionate community offers more return on investment. Wikis and the community members are accessible at all times across all time zones, the info is up-to-date.
Q: Is it good (intentional) that Blizzard’s developers aren’t on the wiki?
A: Thinks developer editing would hinder the wiki’s growth - especially if users “hate” a particular area of the game, they’ll attack the developer. But, they want info to get it out there. Also, it’s more motivating to the community when a developer comments - means he’s reading with out interfering. The Panel moderator said he would prefer that a CEO comment on blogs rather than write a blog. George commented that the forums are for “railing against” a certain area of the game (or a developer). Also, developers do use internal wikis and have found them very helpful for collaborative idea generation - such as asking for ideas for armor.
If community is not motivated enough on their own, might find someone outside of the company who is passionate, or an inside (the company) community manager can help . One panelist said she thinks 5 editors is the “tipping point” - readers will come if those five continually update. This best practice matches with the wikipatterns.com findings and other’s findings.
Q: How does support work within the wiki?
A: George says the community “sends them away.” Because their wiki’s conversation is about strategy only, not how to. Fascinating to me. To attempt to interpret for the enterprise wikis that many tech writers might be working on, it seems like there are two potential conversations and perhaps two communities built up around strategy and best practices versus how to and perhaps even troubleshooting. It’s like the difference between asking for help from a professional services group versus asking for help from the customer support group. There are specific conversations you’d expect to have from each group.
Meatball wiki guy asked, what collaborative projects such as fan on a wiki writing fan fiction on the wiki (amateurs) like what happens in the film industry (I’m not sure what this is an example of, but I’d love to see it.) A: Again George said that their wiki isn’t set up for that, they’d send them to another area, apparently.
On the way out, I ran into another Austinite Laura P Thomas, known as LPT on Twitter, and her daughter. I had met Laura at an Austin Social Media Club meeting. She had chosen the Career rev talk instead, and she said it was good. I told them about the giant pile of Legos (it looked like a pit of Legos from where I saw it while waiting in line! But it was actually a pile.) I saw later on Twitter that they both enjoyed them! I love that kids had things they could see and do at SXSW Interactive. A great start to a great conference.
Lisa Dyer and Alan Porter presented at last week’s DITA Central Texas User Group meeting, and both told tales of end-user doc written and sourced in DITA, with wikitext in mind as an output. About 20 people attended and we all enjoyed the show. I wanted to post my notes to follow up, and I’ll post a link to slide shows as well.
This post covers Lisa Dyer’s presentation on a wiki sourced with DITA topics. I’ll write another post to cover Alan’s presentation.
Although, actually, first, Bob Beims shared Meet Charlie, a description of Enterprise 2.0. Seems very appropriate for the discussions we’ve had at recent Central Texas DITA User Group meetings talking about wikis and RSS subscriptions and web-based documentation.
Lisa has made her presentation available online. My notes are below the slideshow.
DITA source to wiki output case study
Lisa Dyer walked us through her DITA to wiki project. Their high level vision and business goals merged with a wiki as one solution, and Lombardi has customers who had requested a wiki. Lombardi’s wiki is available to customers that have a support login, so I won’t link to it, but she was able to demo the system they’ve had in place since July 2007.
What wiki toolset - open source or entprise wiki engine?
On the question of choosing an open source or enterprise wiki engine, Lisa said to ask questions while evaluating, such as where do you want the intellectual property to develop? Will you pay for support? Who are your key resources internally, and do you need to supplement resources with external help? They found it faster to get up and running and supported with an enterprise engine and chose Confluence, but she also noted that you “vote” for updates and enhancements with dollars rather than, say, community influence. (Editorial note - I’m opining on whether you get updates to open source wiki engines through community influence. I’m certain you can pay for support and enhancements to open source efforts with dollars.)
Run a pilot wiki project
She recommends a pilot wiki, internal only at first, to ferret problems out while building in time to fix the problems. While Michele Guthrie from Cisco couldn’t present on the panel at the last minute, she also has found that internal-only wikis helped them understand the best practices for wiki documentation.
Meet customer needs - or decipher what they want and need
Lisa said that customers wanted immediate updates, knowledge of what’s new with the product and doc (800 pages worth), and wanted to tell others what they had learned. She found that all of these customer requests could be met with a wiki engine - RSS feeds, immediate updates, and the ability to share lessons learned. At her workplace, customers work extensively with the services people and document the implementation specifically, and that information could be scrubbed of customer-specific info. They found that rating and voting features give good content more exposure. Also, by putting the information into wikis, they found that there were fewer “I can’t find this information” complaints.
Intelligent wiki definition and separate audiences for each wiki
They have two wikis - one is for end-user documentation, one is for Services information. In the screens she showed us, Wiki was the tab label for the Services wiki, Documentation was the tab label for the doc wiki. The Documentation wiki does not allow anyone but the technical writers to edit content, but people can comment on the content and attach their own documents or images. The Services wiki allows for edits, comments, and attachments. The customers and services people wanted a way to share their unsanctioned knowledge such as samples, tips, and tricks, and the wiki lets them do that. The Services wiki has all the necessary disclaimers of a community-based wiki, such as “use this info at your own risk” type of disclaimers. Edited to add: The search feature lets users search both wikis, though.
Getting DITA to talk wiki
There are definite rules they’ve had to follow to get DITA to “talk wiki” and to ensure that Confluence knows what the intent is for the DITA content. For one, when they want to use different commands for UNIX and Windows steps in an installation or configuration task, they would use ditaval metadata around in the command line text (using the “platform” property) and use conditional processing for that topic. However, because of the Confluence engine’s limitation of one unique name for each wiki article, they had to create separate Spaces for each condition of the deliverable (UNIX Admin guide or Windows Admin guide, for example). This limit results in something like 12 Spaces, but considering it’s output for several books for separate platforms, 32 individual books in all, that number of Spaces didn’t seem daunting to me. She uses a set of properties files during the build process to tell Confluence what file set to use, and what ditavals they’re seeking, and then passes the properties to the ant build task. The additional wiki Spaces does mean that your URLs aren’t as simple as they could be - but in my estimation, they’re not completely awful either.
While I was researching this blog post further, Lisa also added these details about the Spaces and their individual SKU’s (Stock Keeping Unit, or individual deliverable). “Building on this baseline set of spaces, each new SKU would add 1 to 7 spaces hosting 3 to 21 deliverables, depending on the complexity of the ditaval rules and the product. Obviously, the long pole in this system is ditaval. A more ideal implementation would probably be to render the correct content based on user preferences (or some other mechanism to pass the user’s context to the engine for runtime rendition). Or, a ditaslice approach where you describe what you need, and the ditaslice is presented with the right content. Certainly innovation to be done there.“
Creating a wiki table of contents from a DITA map
She creates a static view of the TOC from the DITA map as the “home page” of the wiki. She currently uses the Sort ID assignment a DITA map XSLT transform to generate the TOC. She said they implemented a dynamic TOC based on the logical order of the ditamap by dynamically adding a piece of metadata to each topic – a sort id using a {set-sort-id} Confluence macro. The IDs are used to populate a page tree macro (the engine involved is Direct Web Remoting, or DWR… an Ajax technology). Currently, their dynamic TOC is broken due to a DWR engine conflict, which should be fixed in the next release. In the meantime, they are auto-generating a more static but fully hyperlinked TOC page on the home page of each Space. A functional solution, not great for back and forth navigation, but it shows the logical order which is pretty critical for a decent starting point.
DITA conref element becoming a transcluded wiki article
Another innovation she wanted to demonstrate was the use of DITA conrefs output as translusions in the Confluence wiki engine, so that in the wiki, the transcluded content can’t be edited inside of an article that transcludes the content. I don’t think it quite behaved the way she wanted it to, but knowing it’s a possibility is exciting. Edited to add: This innovation really does work, Lisa simply was looking at the wrong content (she admits, red-faced.)
Burst the enthusiasm bubble, there are limitations and considerations
One limitation that I observed is that when you transform the DITA source to Confluence wikitext, there are macros embedded, so when someone clicks the edit tab in the wiki, they must edit in wikitext, not the rich-text editor, to make sure the macros are preserved. In the case of the Documentation wiki, they can instruct their writers to always use the wikitext editor. But, for the Services wiki, one attendee asked if users prefer the wikitext editor, and Lisa believes they do. Someone running MoinMoin at their office said they finally just disabled the rich text editor because they didn’t want to risk losing the “cool” things that they could do with wiki text. The problem at the heart of this issue is that if users really like the wikitext editor and do a lot of “fancy” wiki text markup (like macros), then another wiki user using the rich-text editor can break the macros by saving over in rich text. Edited to add: Lisa wrote me with these additional details which are very helpful - “actually, the macros are preserved when in Rich Text Editor (RTE) mode. the problem is that it looks ugly as heck – and if the user is not techie, potentially confusing. the RTE does add all kinds of espace characters to the content– in a seeming random way - and can negatively impact the formatting in general when viewing, but it doesn’t seem to affect our macros. However, if a user wants to use macros to spiffy up the content, then wiki markup mode is definitely recommended.”
Anne is a senior technical writer at Advanced Solutions International. Read 
