In a word - energizing! I had completed my two shared talks - the Wiki roundtripping talk at 2 in the afternoon, with the next talk being at 3:30 when I moderated the Meet the bloggers panel. I had been on my feet for nearly all of both talks, and I was tiring mentally as well as physically. But the informal freestyle nature of the unconference was just what I needed to finish up my day.
Here’s how it “went down.” After the Meet the bloggers panel, Lisa Dyer and I started writing the “presentation” titles from the wiki page onto a white board and placed it outside the unconference room about an hour before the 6:30 start. I talked to people who came up and had questions about it, and also lamented the fact that we were at the same time as the Vancouver STC meeting, which was going to be held in the room next door to ours. Last week I sent their president an email apologizing for the scheduling, saying that they would have been such a fun group to unconference with! So, note to self, if I ever do an unconference again, try to match up with the locals’ schedule.
We had about fifteen people to start with people coming and going. We had problems with the overhead projector, but pulled it together finally on Lisa’s laptop. She demonstrated her DITA to Confluence wiki build process, and said that she’s ready to get it bundled up as an Enterprise Wiki plug-in if there’s enough outside interest. She needs to get resources for the final steps of getting it ready but it sounds like she’ll be able to do that. Lisa has had DITA in production for four years and the DITA-to-wiki workflow in place for over a year now. That plug-in should be valuable as a tool for making structured authoring work for wiki output.
I presented the wiki-based documentation used for the XO laptop simplified user guide, showing both the wiki.laptop.org one-page version as well as the flossmanuals.net wiki version that also has a PDF output. I wanted to demonstrate the Sugar operating system using my Dell laptop in emulation, but I couldn’t get my laptop to display on the overhead projector. The same thing happened at the earlier afternoon wiki presentation, darn it, but fortunately Stewart Mader set us up on his Macbook for that preso. Yay Mac. I also spoke with a localization expert who may have ideas for tapping into the translator communities that would like to work on documentation translations for the OLPC. That is an exciting outcome.
Stewart Mader did a neat mini-workshop-type session where he asked us all to share our daily tasks when working on documentation, and then we each brainstormed about the bottlenecks for each task. For example, I often read what are essentially threaded discussions in our bug tracking tool to try to determine what’s changed and whether the change affects documentation. A bottleneck is often the time it takes to read through the threads. We talked a little bit about how wikis are a better collection for information sometimes than threaded discussions - not that a wiki is the fix in my particular case, but it was good to recognize a threaded pattern and know its limitations.
Tom Johnson did two quick demonstrations of Woopra, a blog statistics tool that helps you communicate with your blog’s readers while they’re viewing your blog. Someone from New Dehli, India, was viewing his site while we were unconferencing! But he or she didn’t respond to Tom’s initial Instant-Message-like talk request. Next he showed us the marvelously simple and easy to use screencasting software, Jing. This bright little sun icon appears over your desktop and you just plug in your microphone if you want to record sound, click the little sun, drag the cursor to define the area of the screen you want to record, and you’re screencasting! Very handy, very free tool (so far.)
Alan Porter had something come up so that he couldn’t present his publishing-doesn’t-have-to-be-last scenario, and I originally thought I’d fill in with some stupid RSS tricks, but we decided we didn’t need to fill in the time and the beer-thirty hour was approaching. So, for posterity’s sake, here are the RSS tricks I know:
Get updates from podcasts and video sites.
Get the “buzz” on blogosphere via RSS – aggregation of information is crucial for this
Notifications on classified ads for specific search words (craigslist has this, and I’ve often used to to seek Thomas the Tank Engine goodies)
Track group conversations via RSS instead of email (such as Yahoo Groups, which offers RSS feeds for conversations)
Do package tracking (nifty! especially for ebay resellers she says this is a useful tool)
Recieve product newsletters (again, RSS as an email alternative)
Job listings aggregation using keyword searches and a location limiter (indeed.com)
Use on calendars to get notification for birthdays, anniversaries, etc.
Subscribe to RSS feeds from higher education institutes to get notification for course information
Get RSS results of searches for competitive intelligence and other specialized information, such as subscribing to a feed that searches for Anne Gentle or Ann Gentle (and I should probably add Anne Gentile, ha ha!)
As our finale, Scott Nesbitt and Aaron Davis presented about Open Source Software’s uses for creating documentation deliverables and it was an engaging little back-and-forth dialog between the two of them, much in the style of their entirely enjoyable podcasts on DMN Communications!
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.
Here are my notes from the morning keynote with Joe Gollner.
This session was a wonderful kickoff for the conference. For the first time, someone was able to connect for me that XML enabled Web 2.0 connectivity. The social web is a direct result of XML allowing for easy combinations and the participatory web. He had many nice diagrams throughout history proving his point, and I really appreciated him making that connection.
He began with a description of Saint Jerome, calling him the patron saint of content management, er, librarians. Saint Jerome was a monk librarian.
A funny game that Joe played with an XML group was, “Who came to XML from the most unusual background?” This game came after Joe showed a picture of his car with an XML license plate, humorously proving he had “arrived” in XML. The third place winner was probably Joe, who has been part of the Canadian artillery. The second place winner was a former prison guard, and the first place prize was a former surfer pottery maker.
During this session, I was reminded of the Washington Post article that John Hunt pointed out at the March DITA User Group meeting, Re-Created Library Speaks Volumes about Jefferson. Jefferson did mashups of books by tearing them apart, even different language books, and then would bind them into new books – reassembly of content 200 years ahead of his time. In 1815, in order to protect his collection after a fire, Jefferson sold his library to Congress for $24,000, the price that Congress felt was reasonable. It became the Library of Congress, a U.S. establishment that as one library says in the article, “These are the books that made America.”Jefferson had created his own taxonomy, using the terms memory, reason, or imagination. Wow, are there parallels to reference, concept, and task? Well… task may be from a stretch of the imagination for some products but hopefully they are ground in fact.
Bob Glushko blogs at docordie.blogspot.com, great blog name and a fascinating presentation. I liked that he shared and described his semi-retirement as verbalizing his desire to be a beach bum to his wife, but his wife said, I still like my job and I want to work, so go get a job! He has been teaching at UC Berkley ever since.
Building information supply chains - example of the E. Coli scare in lettuce in March 2007. Basically had to figure out how to track heads of lettuce, similar to tracking heads of people to avoid long lines at security in the airport. With enough data tracking - input and retrievability - you can make informed decisions.
Common themes of new information services - document exchange, patterns, similar to supply chains and distribution channels. There are hidden documents in business processes.
His “ah-ha” moment? he had always focused on the document, but with ordering on the web, his user experience is what really matters - did the business process work? Did the lobsters arrive dead or alive? Did his shipment get to him in time and was it the right order? You have to know the back-end, the time difference, the travel distance, the choreography and design of the pattern determines success and a happy user experience.
I’m reminded of the fact that there are 39 time zones in the world, and for collaboration across the world, we have to figure out the time zone difference relative to the person you want to collaborate with.
Bob offers an excellent analogy for wiki-based, community-collaborative content - a restaurant’s lines of visibility. At McDonalds, you have backstage production lines for food prep, at Benihana you have food prep as part of the entertainment right at your table (remeber that onion volcano so expertly prepared?) We should try to strategically determine where to draw our lines of visibility - what point of view do we wish to present to our users?
Ah, now he’s talking about a cooking school where the kitchen is the front stage for the cooks, and the back stage for the customers. A restaurant’s dining room is the front stage for the customers, but the back stage for the cooks. I’m reminded of a webpage I read where people proved that writing on a wiki actually helps you learn more about the tasks because you have to figure out your conceptual understanding of the task to write about it. If you allow more writing to happen next to the backstage when it’s the cooks in the kitchen, or the expert writers in the wiki, more beginners can learn by not observing or reading but by actually participating in the writing itself.
While you may have identified more with either the front end or back end design issues, you can choreograph the information experience for the user.
Here are Bob’s slides, also found on slideshare.net.
For the first time in history, there are four generations in the workplace. Adobe is working on technologies that bring elearning to the newest working generation. Adobe is hosting a virtual tradeshow in Second Life tomorrow, May 8. I can’t find a link for more information, but his slide showed it would be staffed from 9am PST to 4 pm PST. They want to welcome the new generation and meet their expectations.
RJ showed embedding video into PDFs - plus showing the 3D animations of a brake disassembly imbedded in a PDF file, very cool demonstration. It drew a round of applause, even. I really appreciate that there was no additional plugin to download - it just works.
Also demonstrated Adobe AIR applications. There is a list of AIR applications at airapps.pbwiki.com, and come to find out, Twhirl is an Adobe AIR application that lets you post from multiple Twitter accounts - a use case that my coworker and I were discussing just last week. What if you wanted different Twitter accounts to follow different groups of people? For example, I could have an ASI Twitter account and only follow ASIers, an OLPC Twitter account that tracks OLPC happenings, and so on. I did finally come to the conclusion that I don’t necessarily need to compartmentalize all of my online activities, I guess – the more of “ourselves” we put online, the bigger the overall picture that people can get of me. Just like smalltalk in the office, Twitter can be the smalltalk/water cooler area for “web worker” employees. Twitter is useful for conferences, also, and we’ve started a #doctrainwest tweme that you can view on the web.
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’m starting a Twitter theme - a tweme, if you will, called “I’m the Mom Who” or “I’m the Mom Whose” which we’ll shorten to #mom for Mother’s Day - to tell funny tales of parenting. (No Dad Left Behind -
on Father’s day, we’ll start the #dad tweme.) A tweet that contains a “hash tag” like #mom gets pulled together with other tweets containing the same tag at twemes.com.
While there may be a few guilty confessions in there, the goal is to gather funny sayings from your kids throughout the day, or recount funny scenarios, not to pour your guts out in 140 characters or less.
Here are some examples:
I’m the #mom whose 4-year-old son who wants to buy his preschool teacher a gift certificate “For Zales, for diamonds!”, for the holidays.
I’m the #mom who joins in when my kids have a screaming contest.
Every one of these tweets are gathered together for easy viewing and laughing at:
At a recent Central Texas DITA User Group meeting, Eliot Kimber told me about a project that he’s working on that can take DITA content and transform it to InDesign layouts. I’m completely fascinated, if feeling a little over my head. But for me, blogging is about learning more, and sharing what you learn in the process.
Basically, he’s getting XML that is DITA into and out of Adobe InDesign CS3. InDesign CS3 has the distinction of being the Adobe product (not FrameMaker, boo hoo) from which you can get Digital Editions/ePub formats.
While Eliot hasn’t created When you pair InDesign with Typefi Autofit, a free plug-in for InDesign, you can get even more complex layouts automated. Automatically. I’m blown away by the possibilities for the OLPC XO manual.
The reason I say he can make textbooks talk using this type of methodology is because textbooks are required to be in some sort of accessible format to the blind or visually impaired by many states, including Texas. So, XML and ePub formats go a long way towards the goal of meeting accessibility standards. Getting textbooks into DITA XML and then into InDesign - brilliant, and accessible.
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’m reminded of the power of the product site by this post from the meeblog, the meebo blog. Meebo is a web-based Instant Messenger for multiple IM platforms such as Google Talk and AIM together in one interface. It’s extremely handy, but apparently a product website redesign has really pushed their visibility even higher. I thought, that makes perfect sense. When people understand the uses for a tool, they use the tool even more readily. Here’s their new product site. The meebo repeater apparently got even more attention lately due to this redesign. I don’t think it’s that they made it easier to use, it’s that they explained a scenario for its use - When meebo access is restricted, install this small piece of software on your home computer to access meebo anywhere. Simple and elegant.
I’m now looking for short explanations for why you do things with the product I document, iMIS. A task overview is part of our templates now, an overview that states the principle of why you want to perform the task. In my mind, though, there’s a subtle difference between a task overview and a scenario for why you’d want to do a task. This forced question, why? is helping me write the correct tasks for the user’s goals. It’s not necessarily part of the product site, but it is helping me understand what
Another reason why I’m reminded of the power of the product site is because of the summary in Scriptorium’s white paper, Web 2.0, Friend or Foe? Four out of six of the bulleted list of integrations that summarize the paper refer to the product web site. We need to remember that unless we integrate our help systems, we risk not answering the right “why?” questions for our users.
I also spoke with a localization expert who may have ideas for tapping into the translator communities that would like to work on documentation translations for the OLPC. That is an exciting outcome.
Anne is a senior technical writer at Advanced Solutions International. Read 
