I could only attend Non Profit Bar Camp Austin in the morning, but it was quite enjoyable. Bar Camp is definitely one of those meetings where the conversations had between the sessions can as informative as the actual sessions.

I arrived and signed in and was standing in front of the board right when the orientation ended – and suddenly was surrounded by bar campers looking at the board with me. There was a good variety of topics – updated to add a link to the Flickr photo set with pictures of all the Post-it notes on the board and screenshot of the set.

Austin – experiencing community in the Open City

I decided to first attend a session called “Plug into Austin’s Web/Interactive Scene” with Austinites Steve Golab and Marcus Mateus. They had a presentation talking about the connections we can make in Austin that may not be available in other cities. Austin has a unique vibe, with slogans like “Keep Austin Weird” and events like SXSW Interactive. We support the creative class as described by Richard Florida quite nicely. In Austin it’s cool to be smart, and we are the chosen location for over 6,000 non profits. They’re active in the Bootstrap Austin community. I learned that “Experiences make us happier than possessions” from a CNN article, after they introduced the concept of an Experience Economy. We talked about some of the experience-centered businesses in Austin, from Alamo Drafthouse, a movie theater that serves food and drinks during the flick, to Groovy Lube, an automotive shop with a groovy vibe, After another person’s comment that where you’re sure to be serviced by a hippy-type mechanic at Groovy Lube, about I wondered aloud if the employee experiences is just as important and part of the branding as much as the customer or participants experience. I think Zappo’s is a good example of an employee’s experience mattering as much to the brand as the customer. So, can nonprofits offer experiences? The speakers suggest you could aggregate communities to make a “scene.”

Google Analytics demonstration

For the next session, I ended up offering to demonstrate Google Analytics – someone had put up a Post-it with “Want: Google Analytics Overview” on it for an 11:15 slot, and at 11:14 I decided to volunteer. At first it was just me and one other person, but then at least a dozen people joined us. One woman from Settlement Home, was able to demonstrate their Google Analytics implementation. She worked with Trademark Media to get their tracking codes set up. She was able to pull up her Dashboard and show the last month’s worth of visitors and so on. We walked through the various areas of Google Analytics – Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content, and Goals – with stories from many of the participants about what has worked well for them. I especially liked the funnel visualization for tracking the completion of a volunteer application. Our Internet connection was flaky for the first 10-15 minutes, but Chris Boyd, who works at Midas Networks, the ISP for my site, by the way, got us up and running.

One of our discussions was about trying to find out what to measure. One non profit had just started using Google Analytics. With non profits, I believe the goals aren’t always about conversions into sales. The prospects turn into clients or donors or volunteers, instead of customers who make a purchase. So after the session was over, I gathered these thoughts about persona-based goals for websites and tracking.

Personas are profiles of people who connect with your organization. They can be highly detailed, are profiles of imaginary people who mimic real-life people that you know, and are captured in a short report typically. I think that personas would make sense for figuring out the goals you have with web analytics and tracking. Based on looking at Any Baby Can, for example, you may have three personas: donors, volunteers, and clients. They’re going to know way more than I do about their goals, naturally , but here are some ideas:

Donor persona – some donors want to remain anonymous, is your pathway through your web content giving them that ability? Or if they are the opposite donor type, and want recognition for their contributions, can you track goals on your website that help with that?

Volunteer persona – What are some other goals that a volunteer wants to complete when they come to your website? Do they have a certain day of the week free and want to find opportunities for that day? Did they attend another event and want to find related opportunities?

Client persona – She may be using a public computer, are there particular pathways or goals you can outline and measure? Is the website useful not just for finding information as a potential client, but how is it serving current clients?

These are likely simplistic, but I wanted to share – I had one of those “oh, shoot, I could have described personas” moments after I left bar camp.

At the very end of the session, I mentioned that I just learned about negative keywords. These are keywords that you use in Adwords campaigns to make sure that your ads don’t show for search queries containing that a certain phrase. That way, people only click through on specific keywords, not related keywords that may not be a good match. A good negative keyword example for Settlement Home (if they started an AdWords Campaign or a pay-per-click campaign), for example, would be “foster dogs” to make sure people looking to foster dogs rather than children not see their ads about foster homes. One non profit was going to apply for an AdWords grant, so hopefully she’ll learn about negative keywords through their strong education program.

Keynote speaker – Holly Ross from NTEN

While I didn’t get to stay for the keynote, the Twitter feed for #npocamp during Holly Ross’s remote keynote was great to follow. One of the more interesting points to me that she made that was tweeted about is that there’s a huge increase (like 600%?) in unstructured data. These are the scattered conversations and communications happening all over the Internet, apparently. How can non profits analyze or monitor unstructured data? Two suggestions came from the person I sat next to in the first session, Gregory Foster: Scout Labs and Radian6.

Summary

What a great way to spend a Saturday morning with energetic, positive people making a difference for people especially using technology and communities. A bar camp, with its unstructured format, was a perfect match for this group.

For our October meeting, we simply asked several Austin-based techpubs teams to review the DITA Maturity Model and to think ahead of time about how you would position your own DITA efforts:

Where do you think your team is in the adoption ladder?
Where do you want to be?

The DITA Maturity Model: A Stepwise Approach to Enterprise Content

• Level 1: Topics
• Level 2: Scalable Reuse
• Level 3: Specialization and Customization
• Level 4: Automation and Integration
• Level 5: Semantics-on Demand
• Level 6: Universal Semantic Ecosystem

The links to the paper are available either as PDF or HTML:

• http://na.justsystems.com/files/Whitepaper-DITA_MM.pdf
• http://dita.xml.org/wiki/introduction-to-the-maturity-model

Here are my notes from the session – feel free to ask questions in the comments! Such a useful session – afterwards I thought “This session is exactly what user groups are made for.”

Lisa Dyer – Lombardi
2005 adoption
1.0 DITA spec
Level 4-5 currently

Wiki system and wiki output
Goal – dynamic personalization
Personalized content view on the wiki – what version, what release name
the users can use custom RSS feeds to “listen” to changes on that content.
Sets a sortID for each wiki page based on ordering of the DITA map which allows for TOC ordering on the wiki page.
Q: Audience for the wiki? A: Behind the firewall development wiki, also support login ID only wiki, external wiki has “warrantied” content plus another space for “community-generated” content.
When migrating, they put everything into Concept DTD, then put it into Perforce (didn’t get “where used” until went to CMS).
But CMS might slow you down. Analysis into paralasys – metadata schemes, “if we spend all this money we need to do it right the first time” pressure.

Mike Austin – Freescale
3 reps – 3 different business groups
started DITA process late 2004
Spread out across first 3 levels

Want structural mechanisms to make it easy to do right, but difficult to do wrong (don’t want artifacts left behind that clutter up views).
There are good political reasons for starting with a CMS if other teams are using it and want tools for finding the content they want.
Q: Does size of team make a difference or location?
A: Mixed… may depend on culture too. But definitely needed help on DITA maps, but Subversion doesn’t lock files it just tries to reconcile differences. Also, how well do you know target deliverables?

Colleen Reilly – Borland
Writer, has been there a year
March 2008, started implementing DITA
All of level 2 – but she doesn’t do level 3, but does do parts of level 4

Three products
Converted a user’s guide – - OEM to BMC Software – started out as FrameMaker files that went to RoboHelp, and another set of Framemaker

files and RH files for BMC templates. Plus translated to German and Japanese. BMC OEMed product is not quite the same as the Borland delivery – so variables helped immensely. Plus conditional text for a certain functionality that was only available in the Borland version. From four sources, back down to single source.
Structure of the document was more challenging.
Reuse – one file with all conrefs, all product names in that file
one file for the whole deliverable – common notes, common commands, plus even four steps at a time, commented heavily to let other writers know where to find content, plus other writers can find it if needed.

Several DITA maps – book DITA map, plus maps for each chapter.

Getting Started guide is 60 topics
API reference guide is 2117 topics
She is able to re-use content.
Q: How do you make sure all your topics are in the DITA map? A: She uses file datestamps to verify – and always adds new topics to the DITA map right away. Noreen looks for a red X in the CMS, but found that even if it’s used in the reltable it is seen as “used” in the CMS.

Sally Derrick -  Borland
Director of info dev services (tools group)

2.5, smatterings in level 4
Started in April 2007 – with a homegrown XML system
Converted
First specialization – glossary
Also since translate to Japanese, enabled See and See Also
Enabled cross-project linking for Eclipse help
2600 topics, 2100 in one document
Installation guides that are DITA – output to PDF only
Corporate glossary created in DITA
CMS is Subversion, still young at all this since they don’t yet have a lot of cross-product content re-use, but as products become more integrated, will have more re-use.
Q: Did you have “where used” in Subversion? A: Biggest status marker they use is “ready to translate” – Subversion attribute. Manually set everything to “no” then set it back to “yes” after its ready to translate.
Implemented context ids for context-sensitive help.

Sally has a t-shirt that says “I don’t nag, I’m a motivational speaker.”

Each team has a lead writer, 3 leads help make decisions.

Sally also manages translation managers – 3 vendors from around the world. XML translations are much better for translation memory, etc. Trados from SDL is one manager’s fav tool, other managers use different tools. Any good translation vendor is going to use translation memory – can reuse content that’s already translated. Author assistant tools may find reuseable paragraphs.

Noreen McMahan- Freescale
Works for Bob Beims – core infrastructure system person at Freescale and trainer for DITA
Agile approach – to scheduling projects
Their original goal was Level 1 by July 1 and they made it.
Leads came up with goals and requirements for achieving Level 1
Proceeded in 2-week sprints
Specializing conditional processing, feature based, structural domain specializations.
XML editor customization, Serna plugin lets it talk to Dakota CMS
One map type to get different output
Check errata content specializations
Plus semiconductor information for register specification for XML formats during design phase.
Also aligning metadata strategy with design source systems and repositories.
Wondering how the CMS could integrate with the web?
Also specializations for semantic tagging motivation.

Domain specializations, metadata strategy
Versioning, CMS another speciality
Integrating Open Toolkit with a widget that now works smoothly
She’s the internal trainer – uses the system and XML editor – giving feature requests.
Level 3 by Christmas

Tom Gihack- Freescale
Last business group to come to the DITA party
Consuming level 3 products from other groups – about to make bigger progress.
Half DITA, half FrameMaker implementation

Q: When you have a preponderance of information legacy vs. when you have DITA – which level can you achieve? Seems like you can get all the levels without DITA?
A: Levels of the model that make it easier to acheive with DITA – typical use case for Freescale – reference manuals that contain 12-15 chpaters specific to that product only, but 20-80 chapters that comes from all over different design centers. Struggling with the issue of combined legacy output – how can you recombine with a new toolset that uses both? Pipeline that starts with FrameMaker and then combines

p. 15 of white paper talks to the point that all of this is possible without DITA – what DITA offers is … refer to paper

Sally says “Content is driving us through the maturity levels.”
Get as much converted as possible, but only specialize when you run into a need for it.

Role-based presentation of the UI – then wouldn’t role-based help be great to go with the U

Can’t see them going further along maturity model ladder until all the content is converted.

For Lisa two the drivers – findability, implementing enterprise level content strategy (bringing other groups on board). Training group is bailing on instructor-led training, but may be led back to that since on-demand and web-based isn’t getting them the results they want. Really struggling. 80% of the coursework was in the user-doc already.
Siemens PLM at Best Practices conference.

150 information development groups at IBM – delivering right content, right person, right time via the right the channel

Lisa’s – Three years in, have more time to write.
Symantec – 5 years in to topic authoring, more time to write and bring customer feedback into the doc, analyze search requests

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.

[slideshare id=281107&doc=a-wiki-driven-company-120396178258519-4&w=425]

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.

Steve Carl already wrote up his notes from BarCamp Austin and I enjoyed his viewpoint very much. This was only my second BarCamp experience, and this year, I decided to take the plunge and actually volunteer to present. Whurley was very encouraging despite my inexperienced questions. “What’s a badge that you wear vs. a badge for your blog?” for example. There are graphics for each, as it turns out. The graphics are completely awesome, and the t-shirts were great, arriving despite an actual train derailment preventing the first shipment from arriving on time.

For those not familiar with the BarCamp format, it’s an unconference where you show up in the morning and put your session into one of the time slots on a white board or on a post-it note. The wiki also had sign-up schedules but the hand-written timeslots at the event win over the wiki page.

The week before BarCamp, I went to the wiki’s Sessions page, clicked the Edit button, and wrote up a short description of a session called Hug the XO. I basically wanted to see if others could bring their XO laptops and I could show them the tricks I’ve learned recently, plus run the Sugar emulation on my Dell laptop.

Getting to Idea City

(photo by Chad Hanna from theotherpaper on flickr)

The morning of BarCamp, getting to BarCamp turned out to be more difficult than I had planned. I got downtown by 9:00, but couldn’t find the Silver Dillo to ride over to 6th and Lamar to GSD&M’s Idea City. So, I took a few touristy photos of Ester’s Follies and the row of SegCity’s Segways, turned around and went back to the Austin Convention Center. I attended a 10:00 SXSW Interactive session, Creating Findable Rich Media Content, and then went back to Sixth street seeking the ‘Dillo. I walked about five blocks until I was past Congress Avenue when I saw a Silver Dillo sign and a person waiting at the sign, then turned and looked up the street to see the trolley coming our way. I double-checked with the woman waiting to make sure there wasn’t a charge since I was silly enough to have not gotten cash out, and sure enough, it’s a free ride. I boarded the Dillo and was on my way.

Getting into BarCamp

Idea City itself is an incredible workplace, full of creative vibes and a wonderful open design with full windows in front. Steve Carl greeted me, I registered with a cool registration application that Twittered my arrival to @barcampaustin (very cool), I had my picture taken for the flickr photo stream, and Steve and I proceeded to the schedule board to see where I could fit in my pres. I really felt more like doing a demo than a full-fledged presentation, so I was happy to see that the demo room had a free half-hour slot at noon. I drew little XO icons on a post-it, titled it “Hug the XO” and headed upstairs to figure out the room layout. On the way up, I saw my old BMC buddy Cote, and ran into Decibel, a good friend of my husband’s, and also met Snax finally, having friends of friends of hers.

Hugging the XO

In the demo room, I hooked up my laptop and ran the Sugar emulation image downloaded from the RedHat Site by using QEMU. In emulation the Activities run pretty quickly, and it’s very easy to display on a large screen. There’s discussions surrounding a projection display for the XO itself, but it’s easiest to emulate for me.

I showed Turtle Art which is really exciting to programmers. People expressed an interest in showing the XOs at Codemash because there’s a grassroots Kidsmash that happens in parallel, so I’ll definitely be following up with Josh on that idea.

I also learned some neat tricks to get deeper into the XO. One way to view the files on the flash memory without using a command line is to launch the Browse Activity and type file:///home/olpc/ as the URL. Now that is a handy shortcut.

I also learned that you can transfer files to and from the XO by using scp from the Terminal Activity by reading the XO setup user guide at OLPC Austria. First, get the IP address by typing iwconfig at the prompt. Then, you can use these instructions:

To upload the file test.py from a pc to the xo (into /home/olpc), use: scp FILE_NAME USER@IP:TO_DIRECTORY

scp test.py olpc@192.168.0.2:/home/olpc

To download the file /home/olpc/xo_test.py from the xo to a local pc, simply reverse the arguments:

scp olpc@192.168.0.2:/home/olpc/xo_test.py ./

We finally got the Acoustic Tape Measure Activity working correctly, and I’ve updated the instructions on Floss Manuals appropriately. Test your task instructions, I always say! Fortunately, this was a fun one to test. We had to have the laptops beep at each other at least 4-5 times before the measurements came into a reasonable range, starting out at nearly 200 meters, and eventually settling on just over 3 meters. Success! The noise they make to each other almost sounds like they’re spitting at each other. Kids will love this activity with a pair of laptops.

People really enjoyed the Speak Activity and we laughed to discover you could give it multiple eyes.

I think we had at least a dozen people stop by the demo room, and after the demo session was over, we set up two of them near the lunch pickup line. Steve was nice enough to “babysit” the XOs while I went back to some afternoon SXSWi sessions, and he said he thinks at least 100 people got to see and try out the XOs for themselves. We downloaded Flipsticks, played some Tam Tam Jam, showed off the Browse Activity, surfing to any URL we needed to, and generally had a great time. We met other XO owners and I told them about the XO-Austin users group, and told everyone they could meet us at Las Manitas on Sunday for an XO meetup. I’ll write another story about my lunch meeting with SJ Klein from OLPC, Robert Nagle, the XO-Houston user’s group organizer, and Melissa Hagemann from the Open Society Institute (OSI). We had a great time together.

Summing it up

This experience was such a great opportunity for me to talk to people about things I believe in (kids, technology, and education) while having fun being a technical writer. I was intimidated initially because I’m not a programmer, and so I wondered if I’d be questioned for even volunteering to present, but I realized that no matter how technical I was, I would be less technical than someone in the room and more technical than someone else in the room. So, the correct action to take is to share the knowledge you have and listen to others to learn more about the topics that interest you.

My only regret from BarCamp is not staying longer for Dawn Foster’s talk about Community Management. I had asked my husband to meet me at the Convention Center with my two sons so we could go to Screenburn together, but after seeing how intimidated my four-year-old would have been by the shoot-em-up video games there, I cancelled on them and wished I had stayed at BarCamp longer. I’ll just have to settle for reading Dawn’s notes about her BarCamp experience instead.

So many sessions that I want to attend, but at least sched.org lets me select more than one session at a time. Such an awesomely simple interface and login is so quick, just an email address and a password and you’re scheduling in no time.

I’ve also put an invite out on upcoming.org to anyone who wants to meet with other XO users to come to Las Manitas for a late Sunday lunch. Thanks tantek for the photo.

What can you teach with the XO laptop? I’m still pondering that question for US-based classrooms. I’m reading the news from Birmingham Alabama and the blog entries from Dallas-Fort Worth Texas school systems with interest. Apparently you can buy a certain minimum of XO laptops if your school district or other group wants to incorporate them into their learning activities. Sign up at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Laptop_requests. With some grassroots fundraising efforts, a large-scale purchase of XO laptops seems attainable, perhaps even for Austin ISD.

Last week’s post with a picture of my four-year-old using the XO at our dining room table generated a response that a picture shows it all. I’d say that these pictures capture even more of the spirit of the OLPC project, showing a preschool teacher and two students have a blast with them, taking pictures of themselves, each other, and even taking pictures of the others’ XO.

I’ll also attest to the durability and sturdiness of these laptops. My son was walking quite quickly in the classroom with it (okay, maybe even running, but it’s not like he runs with scissors!) and tripped and fell with it. He was unhurt, these kids bounce back unbelievably from falls, and I was equally impressed with the complete durability that the XO displayed even when it probably took a bounce on the carpeted classroom floor.

So, what am I teaching with the XO?

My first session with the kids focused mostly on TamTamMini and Turtle Art, both auditory and visually appealing. These are four-year-olds, so they’re a little young for the target age for these laptops. The target age is about 6-12 years old. But, they figured out the touchpad quickly (and some, like my son, want the touchpad to allow for a mouseclick event when tapped like my Dell laptop responds, but not so with the XO touchpad.)

The kids also crowd around the screen and want to touch everything, which is fine, until I want to do the Turtle Art demonstration which involves clicking Project, and then clicking the icon for Samples and then waiting and then opening a sample file. But they were rewarded for their hands-off stand-off with bubbles and rainbow colors.

In Turtle Art, I thought I’d always have to open the Blocks menu and drag the “clean “puzzle piece out, then click it to get the full starting effect. However, I just discovered that many of the samples have the clean block out already, it’s just hidden behind the menu. I finally figured out to click the hide, erase, or stop buttons to have the turtle stop mid-way through his task. The kids liked the Turtle Art demonstration as well and asked for more. I must admit, I didn’t feel like I was teaching them anything, but these are four-year-olds. With repetition and some more ideas we could build several learning opportunities around that Activity, I believe. I just got a great PDF file showing how to make the turtle draw letters, and I intend to use this demonstration for my next visit.

The next session I attempted to get the Acoustic Tape Measure Activity to work, but it failed miserably. I think it’s because I didn’t go to the Group view and Invite the other XO to the Activity. We’ll try again another day, after I’ve done some more testing.

I also introduced the Record Activity and this was a huge hit for photos. I didn’t show them how to record audio or video, thinking I’d save that for another day. The pictures it takes are 640 x 480, and quite nice with natural lighting. See examples at the XO Photos group on flickr. In a future update of the XO, EXIF data will be available on the photos taken with the XO, and Flickr can then identify the source of the photo as an XO. I’ll have to upload some of the photos the kids took.

One kid even took a picture of his behind with it, reaching way back to push the O button on the game keypad (a nice shortcut way to take pictures with the Record Activity so that you don’t have to use the touchpad and X button click!) His teacher and I laughed so hard at his ingenuity and problem-solving – just to get a picture of his bottom.

Who else has taken their XO into a classroom setting, and what are you learning and teaching with the XO? I’d love to hear more, and I’ll be at SXSW Interactive and BarCamp Austin as well so please do say hi if you see me there.

There are two upcoming Central Texas DITA User Group meetings that you don’t want to miss if you’re looking into wikis for documentation.
Jan. 1/23/08

Ben Allums, Quadralay – wiki.webworks.com

Chris Almond, IBM – internal wiki

Anne Gentle, OLPC – wiki.laptop.org and www.flossmanuals.net

Ragan Haggard, Sun – www.opends.org/wiki

Feb. 2/21/08

David Cramer, Motive – internal wiki

Lisa Dyer, Lombardi – internal wiki

Alan Porter, Quadralay – wiki.webworks.com

The January panel will talk about models for information development in a wiki framework – a couple of case studies with a demo of each system to illustrate use cases/workflow/high-level architecture. We’ll have a discussion of how these models might empower our professional community.

Ragan Haggard presented Delivering Open Source Technical Documentation via a Wiki at the San Antonio STC chapter this month, and his slides are available for download. My favorite slide is number 17 – and I have his permission to quote it verbatim here.

Why not resist this fad?

• Removing barriers to input from SMEs greatly
improves the documentation.
• These docs will get even better with feedback and
input from real users.
• We writers have no less control over the content
than before.
• A wiki has as much or as little structure as you
impose on it, the same as a book.
• I don’t think this level of collaboration is a fad.

We should have a lot to talk about and perhaps even a homework assignment between the two sessions.

It was easily 80 degrees in Austin today, but I so enjoyed a Christmas performance tonight despite the lack of cold or snow. The Yellow Tape Construction Co. is putting on The Ultimate Christmas Musical – The Musical at the Salvage Vanguard Theater off I-35 near the University of Texas in Austin. I laughed and laughed and I’ll leave it at that since I’m no theater review writer. But you’ll thank me for telling you about it if you go, and you’ll thank me for the laughs you’ll get from their blog (and they twitter too!)

Where else could you see an elf chasing (or being chased by?) a group of people on a Segway tour of Austin but in Austin? I challenge you to come up with a better picture of surprise Christmas spirit than this.

Happy holidays to all and to all a good night.

Next week I’m speaking at our local Austin STC meeting about wikis and technical documentation. Here’s the relevant information if you’re in the area. Interestingly, Scott Abel of The Content Wrangler is giving his Web 2.0 talk at the Quadralay WebWorks RoundUp that afternoon as well. It’s a Web 2.0 world for tech pubs folks in Austin next Tuesday. Hey, I just noticed that Quadralay has started a Blogs area on webworks.com, great!

Here’s the logistical information for the meeting in Austin next week:

A Technical Writer’s Role in Web 2.0 – Wiki-fy Your Doc Set

Anne Gentle, senior technical writer at ASI International and blogger at http://www.justwriteclick.com/

How can a wiki be used to build user-centric, user-maintained technical documentation sites that offer thorough and accurate technical information? More than two years ago, I issued a challenge to my colleagues to send me examples of technical documentation in a wiki. I was skeptical that wikis could be used in a meaningful way for technical content. Through tips from coworkers and word of mouth, I found several wikis to study for the types of content that can be placed in a wiki and try to derive best practices for when, why, and how to start a wiki.

Where: Commons Center on the J.J. Pickle Research Campus, Austin, TX

It’s near the corner of Braker Lane and Burnet Road. There’s a map of the campus at http://www.utexas.edu/commons/maps/index.html.

When: Tuesday, November 6, 2007

6:00-6:30 PM: Networking

6:30-7:30 PM: Program

7:45-9:00 PM: Networking Dinner at the California Pizza Kitchen at The Domain

I’d love to see you there!

I’m happy to report that my article about using wikis for technical documentation was published last week in the STC Intercom.

A PDF my article is available for anyone to download, STC member or STC non-members alike.

I’ll be giving a presentation about wikis for technical documentnation to the STC Austin community on Tuesday November 6th at the Commons Center, which is located at 10100 Burnet Road, Austin, TX 78758, near the southwest corner of Burnet Road and Braker Lane on the University of Texas J. J. Pickle Research Campus. Map

If you’d like to see what else I’ve written about wikis, take a look at the articles in my wiki category, or check out this list from my talk.bmc.com blog.

So many people helped me with the Intercom article. Kelly Holcomb is an excellent editor and helped me with it in her small amounts of spare time. Emily Kaplan read an early copy and also helped me sort through my notes. Michael Cote has sent me interesting items about wikis that he has found and also constantly tags useful information in del.icio.us. Diane Fleming was investigating wikis on her own, asked me about them, and then gave me great feedback on an early copy of the article. Tom Johnson was extremely positive when he first read it as well. I spoke with Dee Elling who had two excellent experiences to talk about in her interview with me. Harry Miller had a podcast interview with Molly Bostic, the PM on the MSDN wiki team, that was very informative.

It takes a community to write about online communities. Thanks, everyone!