just write click

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.

My favorite example, since I’m fascinated with wikis for documentation, has to do with setting up a community of practice faster than ever known in history. On Flickr, a group dedicated to High Dynamic Range photography became a popular destination and learning and collaborating connection.

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.

On The Content Wrangler site there’s a great post asking where does user participation fit in our world? There are plenty of answers, and my interest lies in the case studies that show the amazing power of what results when users actively participate. If you’re interested in user participation and social networking, check out Tom Johnson’s interview with Scott Abel about social networking.

I’m continuing my musings on connected conversations and tech pubs since there were such great comments and conversations going on with it.

I had an “ah ha” moment at SXSW Interactive, when one of the social media metrics panelists Rohit Bhargava said he sees three areas or channels for measurable conversations - Public Relations, Marketing (Sales), and Customer Support.

For me, those three categories crystallized this connection: where our role as tech pubs is strongest in an organization, that’s where we might start successful conversations.

Gordon McLean’s post cites Marketing and Sales as a strong tie-in, and sure, I’ve seen that and worked in that type of environment. Marketing concepts such as Business Service Management and white papers about ITIL were the primary reason and communication idea I used when I started my blog at talk.bmc in 2005. Product documentation that helps drive sales or close deals is a great method for proving our value.

Tech support seems the best alignment for many companies, as Charles Jeter’s follow-up points out. Tech publications that drive down support costs are another area where value proof lies.

Where tech writers don’t stand much of a chance, based on my limited experience, is public relations. We tend to be a fact-finding lot, not the “spin doctor” type, nor are we necessarily prepared or educated in the ways of crisis communication. I myself cringe to think of having to write blog entries for Southwest Airlines after the recent safety fine. There’s a great case study on crisis communications at BlogWrite for CEOs - Case Study: Southwest Airlines’ Corporate Blog and Crisis Communications and reading it makes me realize how difficult it can be to blog for a company as a representative of a company.

Now, my question is, will companies pay technical writers for a conversation rather than a deliverable? Perhaps only if there are some metrics to prove worth and value.

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 Shelton GM of Wikia Gaming, Wikia Inc - A collection of freely-hosted ad-supported wiki communities using the Open Source MediaWiki software.
April Burba Community Mgr, NCsoft - Game software publisher
George Pribul Lead Admin, WowWiki.com
Jake McKee, moderator Chief 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.

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!

Here’s a link to my latest article on Hyperviews Online, the newsletter/blog for the Society for Technical Communication Online Special Interest Group (STC Online SIG). It’s called Using a Content Management System (CMS) for your STC community web site.

The STC Austin chapter is re-designing the community website, and I volunteered to help. We started researching CMS use and I found that quite a few sites were using WordPress, so I emailed the webmasters to learn more. The article is a result of that email survey where I learned more about WordPress as a CMS.

As you might have seen on The Content Wrangler recently, I wrote a response to JoAnn Hackos’ article, Is there a wiki in your future? and Scott Abel chose the title for my special contribution to his site. I think the title of this blog post - Emerging wiki use - now and future wikis - would have been a better title than “Anne Gentle vs JoAnn Hackos” but unfortunately I learned that his blogging system would cause broken links if he changed the title after I requested a title change. Ah, content management systems, why do they break your heart?

I do want to make sure that readers know that JoAnn and I are not at odds about wiki use at all - rather, we are both trying to find the best practices for building a wiki that will thrive. My thought on the “vs” in the title is that it is intended to show the polarization on the issues surrounding wikis and technical publications. JoAnn and I have emailed back and forth this week to continue to discuss and find that we are not on opposite sides of the issue.

I’ve happily read the blog entries from other writers that read both articles, with my favorite reference being Sarah O’Keefe’s “eponymous rebuttal” phrase. Subtle and clever, and sent me to m-w.com, so I love it.

• The Age of… Expertise?
• Wikis, and the shifting of power
• Good Question

A neat outcome so far from this article is that I had a discussion with someone who had experienced something similar to JoAnn’s scenario. One of my readers described a situation where he was creating and updating wiki pages, trying to extract and describe an exact algorithm for an online game. Apparently in gaming communities, the developers can be very tight-lipped about the exact way that game play works (weaponry or armor for example), and the challenge to the gamers is to figure out the best strategies based on their experiences with the game. Without arbitration on the wiki (or customer support forum), though, outright content wars ensue and the wiki content about the algorithm becomes untrustworthy.

It’s a fascinating example. I’d like to find more examples related to technical content to find out what arbitration policies would work well. Let me know your experiences in this area - have you had a need for arbitration on your favorite wiki yet?