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Archive for the ‘wiki’ Category:
Webinar available now from Scriptorium Publishing
I gave a webinar this week for Scriptorium that will be available online titled “Documentation as Conversation.” The fact that it’s recorded lets you avoid scurrying around rearranging meetings in Outlook just to attend it. It sold out which was great to hear, but I like that the message and conversation continues through the recording. One of my fun examples was the Wordle visualization of my tags from the social bookmarking tool, del.icio.us.
During the question and answer session, someone mentioned they felt like social media made her feel like we’re becoming paleontologists. I think she referred to my many examples of how to “stalk” your users to learn more about them and their goals, especially if you document software. I search for my product’s name in Indeed.com job listings as well as look for job titles with my product’s name in LinkedIn to learn more about the people I’m writing for. I wrote up the technique in this blog post, Find your user’s vocabulary and use his or her key terms as keywords.
I also had a follow up email saying that people want to know, where should my team start conversations? Or where should we focus our time if we do start? In my book, I talk about phases: Listen, Participate, Share, Build a Platform. I think you should start with listening and monitoring what’s already being said. Next, start by commenting on blogs or by blogging yourself. A baby step towards blogging is to blog on an internal site, behind your firewall, just to limit your audience if that makes you more comfortable.
Also I’d recommend trying out tools that are already installed that you don’t have to maintain and install yourself. For example, I started justwriteclick.com on wordpress.com and paid $10 a year to map my domain name. When I knew WordPress was a good fit for me and my blogging and site needs, I went ahead and found an ISP and installed WordPress myself. And two years later, I’m hooked on WordPress and I’m even attending WordCamp Dallas in a few weeks.
Sharing content is the next step, and the final step is providing a platform for users to bring their own content in. These steps take time but you will learn valuable lessons along the way and hopefully avoid any stumbling or disastrous results. It’s okay to fail, though. You learn new lessons with each attempt and approach.
So keep an eye out for the recording of the webinar, Documentation as Conversation. The price remains at USD $20 and you get to schedule listening to it any any time of the day. It’s an hour long and if you do listen to the recording, feel free to contact me via email with any questions. I am looking forward to hearing even more feedback!
Social weather in online communities
I’m writing this as the rain falls down in Austin, Texas. I’m learning that with practice, you can learn the ebb and flow of a conversation and become a meteorologist for the “social weather” that’s ongoing in a community. For an example of social weather, do what Clay Shirky describes in his description of the course with the same name at New York University. Simply make some observations next time you walk into a restaurant. Is it noisy or quiet? Slow or busy? Are there couples or groups dining? That collective atmosphere is the social weather, which I first read about on Jason Kottke’s blog.
In a restaurant you have visual and auditory cues to give your inner meteorologist a chance to assess the social weather. In an online community, you need to understand the cues that occur in writing, in emoticons, and in frequency and intensity of updates to content. In the presentation “Blogs and the social weather” at the Internet Research 3.0 conference in October 2002, Alex Halavais describes a deep dive into analysis of blogger’s discourse.
“By measuring changes in word frequency within a large set of popular blogs over a period of four weeks, and comparing these changes to those in the ‘traditional’ media represented on the web, we are able to come to a better understanding of the nature of the content found on these sites. This view is further refined by clustering those blogs that carry similar content. While those who blog may not be very representative of the public at large, charting discourse in this way presents an interesting new window on public opinion.”
While this concept may sound new and exciting, it is quite 20th century. I was surprised to learn that analyzing newspaper content to determine public opinion was researcher Alvan Tenney’s original concept in 1912. 1912!
More technical documentation wikis
Photo courtesy cogdog on flickr
I’ve been needing to update my list of wikis used for technical documentation, to see if the list is growing. Here are a few more technical information wikis. They seem to lean towards the programmer audience and might be used for a repository storage (of code samples).
Knoppix wiki (zero to Linux in Five Minutes)
Ajax patterns (repository for Ajax programmers)
From the blog entry “12 popular wikis that actually work” I harvested these technical topic wikis as well:
Mozillazine Knowledge Base (What a wealth of good practices in wiki writing and content maintenance. Check out their Knowledge Base changes page.)
Opera Browser and Internet Suite wiki
I also have to mention the original, WikiWikiWeb, as a wiki to click through to every once in a while for ideas and a reminder of the original simplicity of wikis.
In other wiki-related news, the PBwiki site has changed their name to PBworks and Stewart Mader had the scoop in his blog entry today, “PBwiki Becomes PBworks; Launches Edition for Law Firms.” I find it interesting that they’ve removed the word wiki. Google Sites did something similar when they acquired JotSpot – they didn’t name it Google Wiki even though collaborative authoring was at the heart of JotSpot’s sweet spot.
And Google Knol, while similar to wiki, is trying a somewhat anti-wiki content model in that multiple articles can exist for the same topic and supposedly the best articles rise to the top to gain the most attention. But Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson points out that traffic is disappointing six months after the launch of Google Knol.
What are some of your favorite technical wikis? I’d love to hear about them.
Climb collaboration levels with me in Atlanta
Photo courtesy lollaping
I finished my presentation about Climbing the Levels of Collaboration for the Collaboration Institute at the STC Summit and I’m so excited about it I can’t stand it! True confession: I was up until 1:00 AM finishing it up and uploaded it quite late.
I found this great collaboration exercise that I’ve incorporated into the session. So we’ll be drawing with Crayola markers. Maybe even collaboratively. I’m hoping for quite the Back of the Napkin experience. 
This session walks through the different ways you can collaborate with your users (and co-workers) especially when wikis are enabling the collaboration. I’ll be talking about Book Sprints and FLOSS Manuals and tell stories from my experiences. I was inspired by the examples of amazing group accomplishments described in Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Groups can take action even quicker than ever before in history thanks to tools that amplify group communications such as wikis, blogs, and instant messaging. There are three distinct levels of collaboration that a group can attain and what they accomplish directly correlates to the level of collaboration.
People I talked with definitely wanted to know best practices for wiki authoring techniques. One person even wanted to know how to incorporate user-generated content into their help system. I’ve heard that request before – such as, how could you import wiki content into Robohelp? Also, what I learned at last weeks’ talk was a high number of people wanting recommendations for wiki engines. There are over 90 to choose from on wikimatrix.org. Eep. Writers also wanted to how to organize content on a wiki. I won’t promise to have all the answers or any of the answers but I am looking forward to sharing my stories and hearing yours.
Gather ’round, Wikify your Doc Set slides now available
I had a great time talking to the New York Metro STC chapter from my office in Austin, Texas last night! There were twenty-some in the room, plus an additional twenty or so online. This was a great turnout for a chapter meeting with a virtual component.
I found I needed the chat backchannel to get me through the blindness and silence on the phone – the audience was so polite and didn’t interrupt but I found myself constantly checking for feedback and realizing the only feedback I could get was from the WebEx chat window flashing orange and white every once in a while. And the discussion beforehand about Twitter (editing tweets and tweeting edits) was light and entertaining and certainly kept my nerves calmed by letting me snicker with my hand over the phone mic.
I’ve made my slides available on Slideshare and I hope you’ll comment there and ask any additional questions you may have. I was energized afterwards! I really appreciated the opportunity to talk about wikis and wiki-like documentation.
What FLOSS Manuals did at Winter Camp
My summary view is that we activated and energized our network, borrowing those terms from Zita Joyce, my outreach co-worker for the week whom I quizzed endlessly about what it’s like to live in Amsterdam. It was a productive and exciting week for a fledgling non-profit like FLOSS Manuals. We have a pile of work ahead of us, but by distributing the work to teams we have created efficiencies and people have chosen their areas of interest and abilities. Check out this diagram showing the work from the week.
There’s also a great video depicting “A day in the life of FLOSS manuals…”
“Roll Up! Roll Up! for the greatest show on earth. That’s right never before have you had such unlimited access to a distributed network
meeting in real life. This time we know it’s for real. This is pure gold for network academics the world over.” I’m just rebroadcasting from Mick Chesterman, an amazing activist and video pro with whom I asked about everything from screencasting to quilt blogs.
Yet those two bits of media best barely describe my amazing week in Amsterdam. So I offer my photos from a couple of sightseeing tours as well.
And now, I’d better get to work on the Firefox Book Sprint! We have fourteen remote collaborators and starting in earnest tomorrow. If you’re in the Austin area, join me at Flightpath at Duval and 51st from 5:00-7:00 tomorrow and Wednesday (3/17 and 3/18). You’ll find me as the writer with the FLOSS Manuals sticker on my laptop.
12 Networks, One Camp
Last night we all gathered in a movie theater setting and each network attending Winter Camp gave a five minute presentation about their network and each member introduced themselves, in English, even though only a handful of the 160 people here speak English as a first language.
I was both humbled and in awe of the activism and energy my fellow Winter Campers display. Many, it seemed, are artists in new media or curators. There are some developers here as well but the majority of attendees seem to be actively running conferences or in-person events themselves. There were few US-ers there, with many more Europeans represented. One other network organizer said she invited her US activists but they were busy with a potential union organization of reality TV script writers.
Not only is the artwork for Winter Camp cool, the vibrant participants are making this event really interesting. Rather than a t-shirt giveaway for the event, we all got European-sized pillow case shams. Great idea!
Andy Oram, an O’Reilly editor, has two blog entries already posted and I wanted to be sure to link to them to offer his perspective which has been extremely valuable. Today I learned that large publishers consider a book’s “buzz window” (my term, not the publisher’s) to be about three weeks only. In other words, you only get about three weeks to promote a book. He discusses “a network of networks” in his first post (be sure to click through to the video) and OLPC along with many other networks in his second.
Today we met from 9-6:30 with an hour break for lunch, and had great discussions about not only the writer’s experience with the FLOSS Manuals tool, but also what experience are we creating for readers? I gave a short presentation about Book Sprint planning and we discussed ideas for improving and building on the Book Sprint experience for at least an hour.
The upcoming Book Sprints are listed on the FLOSS Manuals blog, but I’ll also list them here:
PureData Book Sprint
We are trying to work out the dates now for a sprint in NYC. Hans-Christoph Steiner and Derek Holzer will be at the helm.
Possibly it will be in late March, in NYC.
FSF Book Sprint
The Free Software Foundation will host Book Sprint (Organised by Andy Oram and Adam Hyde ). It will be to work on a manual introducing newbies to the command line.
Boston, March 21,22
Doctrain Book Sprint
The Doctrain conference will host a Book Sprint in California. Janet Swisher and Adam Hyde will co-ordinate. The sprint will be about FireFox, and the Mozilla Foundation are sending Chris Hofmann (Director of Engineering at Mozilla) to participate.
Palm Springs, California. March 17-20.
Open Translation Book Sprint
A Book Sprint to write a manual about Open Translation tools. being organised by Adam Hyde and Allen Gunn (Gunner from Aspiration Tech).
Amsterdam, June 26-30.
Free as in freedom, not free as in no cost
I’ve been telling writers early and often about the upcoming Firefox Book Sprint at DocTrain West March 17 and 18 to write a manual for Firefox 3.0 along side of Chris Hofmann, Director of Engineering for the Mozilla Foundation! I can’t go to DocTrain for various reasons, mostly because March is a busy month in Austin with SXSW in the middle of it. But I do plan to help out with writing each day by noon Pacific time and working until I have to pick my kids up from preschool.
One of the responses I’ve gotten that I think is typical for many professional writers is “I can’t write for free right now.”
So I’ve been working on my statement of value, and here it is. I have found my volunteer work to be invaluable as a learning experience and exercise in connecting to others. But I will also admit that I’d personally love to sell enough books that a “big time” publisher notices and says, wow.
Before the OLPC Book Sprint in August, the FLOSS Manuals community had quite a nice discussion about money and free documentation and I am hoping to convey it accurately to you. Adam Hyde states it much more eloquently than I can in this video.
FM doesn’t intend to necessarily make a profit on book sales, but we aren’t afraid to make money either. Income from book sales is typically used to further fund FM’s goals, though, which is a non-profit model – invest your gains to further your aims.
We have a 2 Euro markup on printed books sold through Lulu but anyone can download the PDF for free from FLOSS Manuals, always. If a book sold 10,000 copies (or some other high number), that book’s Maintainer could give all the money back into FLOSS Manuals, or use the money to do things like pay for development on the project itself, pay themselves a writer or organizer fee (such as 1000 Euros per Book Sprint), pay for travel and accommodation for writers to attend a Book Sprint, or sponsor a Book Sprint to start another related book, and so on.
My point of this post is to try to ensure that writers know that FM is about free as in freedom. FM is in its startup phase but growing fast. If innovation in book publishing is an interest of yours, or if you think you could some day “profit” by contributing to a particular book on FM, then you might want to find out more about involvement in a Book Sprint. It wouldn’t have to be the Firefox one coming up, but it’s a wonderful opportunity to get started.
I’d love to hear what you think about this model.
User-generated content versus community-generated content
I think there is definite triangle emerging in my mind when I try to notice differences in quality and time-to-market and cost for user-generated content and community-generated content.
To me, user-generated content is the type of content you find in forums and mailing lists. It is likely to show up on a search for information and troubleshooting. User-generated content varies widely in quality and may be outdated quickly. Usually readers of user-generated content understand “Caveat Lector” – Reader Beware.
Community-generated content has a different quality bar, in my mind. While a community may be defined with a mailing list as its only communication, more likely the community is not using the mailing list itself to offer how-tos or detailed troubleshooting. Instead, a community, since it is defined with a common goal, may have content creation as one of the means to achieving that goal.
So which is faster? User- or Community- content?
I believe that individual users are faster at posting informal, conversational responses to specific questions. But a community may have a more thought-out approach to the big picture of what needs to be created, content-wise. I am not just talking about written content, although of course FLOSS Manuals is one of the communities I’ve had direct experience with. I’m also thinking of Wordpress.tv, where the site was “seeded” with twenty or so professionally-created video tutorials, but then the community members’ contributions were also accepted. While it may take a while to create that content, and it might not have a professional voice-over, it is good enough to help another community member learn a particular WordPress technique.
Good enough content
Both types of content often offer “good enough” answers to questions or advice about a best way to proceed with a particular solution. Good enough is judged by the reader. I don’t think that I’m calling one type of content more professional than another. Rather, the usefulness of the content vetted by a community is the criteria for judging its quality.
What do you think? Is there a distinction to be drawn between user-generated content and community-generated content?
What is Anne Gentle up to?
I finally feel some energy returning after my eye injury about a month ago, although my right eye remains dilated which still means that side is a bit out-of-focus and I don’t like driving at night. I feel like I need to give a status update or some such. So here goes.
Winter Camp
With luck my eye should be just fine in time for a big event coming up: Winter Camp 09 the first week of March. I’ll be representing and working for FLOSS Manuals at this event, held in Amsterdam. From the description, it will be an amazing week:
Network Cultures Winter Camp will be a mix of presentations and work spaces with an emphasis on getting things done. It will be a four-day program of work spaces and plenary presentations, in which a dozen networks (each of which has 5-15 people) can work on their specific current topics.
The format was inspired by a cardboard box art installation that activates a temporary warehouse of contemporary knowledge from what I can gather from a translation of the page, Re-fitting ideas. Come on, that’s incredible. I am so thrilled to be a part of it. And I know it’s going to be a week of hard work.
Preschool website completed, using Wordpress 2.7
We’ve also finished the preschool website I mentioned in my interview with Michael Silverman of Duo Consulting. We used WordPress hosted at Midas Networks. I recorded some screencasts with Jing to show other parent volunteers how to edit content and work with images. All the photos on the site were taken by parents so it’s quite the “do-it-yourself” website. I am hoping that Wordpress 2.7 will be easy enough for even those in our volunteer and staff group who are not technically savvy but still give us the growth towards more content creators that we have in our goals for the site.
FLOSS Manuals and OLPC
We’ve sold over 200 copies of the OLPC Laptop Users Guide on Lulu.com, and Adam Hyde gave a copy of one of FLOSS Manuals’ books to Bob Young, the CEO of Lulu, while they were at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference. Impressive. I still plan to make the Sugar Users Guide better. Adam Hyde and I are working on a book about how to run a Book Sprint in FLOSS Manuals, naturally, and we would welcome additional contributors.
DITA and Web 2.0
I’ve been approached to help put a public face on standards for DITA and Web 2.0 projects such as DITA for wikis (an example is Lisa Dyer’s DITA2Wiki project on SourceForge) and DITA for blogs (another example is DITA to Wordpress or DITA and microformats).
STC Intercom Editorial Advisory Panel
I’ve been pretty impressed with the STC Intercom issues in 2009 so far, but I wrote one of the articles so perhaps my judgement would be playing favorites. I would like to gather feedback from STC members and non-members who read the articles – how’s the content grabbing you this year?
Author-it 5.2
It looks as though 5.2 is the version of Author-it that will allow us to upgrade from 4.5. Our content just wouldn’t publish adequately (Word or HTML) on 5.0 or 5.1, but now that 5.2 is released, fingers crossed, we’ll be moving to 5.2 soon. I should write a blog post about some of our testing on our 20,000+ object database. I’m getting used to the Ribbon Bar as I continue to work in Word 2007, and Author-it’s 5.x interface feels a lot like Word 2007.
Writing a book, do tell me what you want to know
Last but certainly not least, I’m working with a professional editor to try to finalize my book about documentation as conversation that examines the power of social media for writing projects. It walks through the myriad of possibilities of different types of social media tools and analyzes how writers and communities are using these tools for technical documentation. Look for it this spring!
Anne Gentle is the author of 
