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Posts Tagged ‘community’
Progress on the Conversation and Community book
The final details for my book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, are coming together. Lots of news to report, so here goes.
I’m so excited to announce that Eliot Kimber has agreed to use my book for the DITA for Publishers project, taking the content from Adobe InDesign to DITA.
Tom Johnson also posted a fun interview he recorded during the STC Summit. I told Tom, I can hear myself grinning. This book is just fun to talk about.
I’m often asked, how long have you been working on it? I answer that I’ve been working on it for over a year now. It combines lots of stories from my corporate blogging days at BMC Software with my foray into the open source community with the One Laptop per Child project, SugarLabs (the education project that runs the open source software on the OLPC laptop), and most importantly, FLOSS Manuals, providing free software for free documentation. My thirty-hour work week at ASI has afforded me the time to write out my journey and my observations along the way.
What a journey it has been and I’m so pleased with how the book is turning out. This week I am furiously indexing (is there any other way to index besides furiously?) and often messing with recto and verso pages, something I haven’t done in InDesign before and boy does it show. My PageMaker days as a graduate assistant at Miami University’s Center for Chemical Education are coming in handy, no doubt about it.
I think we’ve finalized the cover design, which for me is a very exciting part of real bookmaking! I’ll see if I can share it on my blog soon.
Four fine people have agreed to do technical reviews and I know some of them are at least 100 pages in. I hope they have insights – but not too many that may cause me to think too hard. Just kidding, Alan, Will, Sarah, and Scott! 
Keep reading and keep your notes at the ready because I’m ready to make all the changes needed to keep this project rolling. This book’s time has come.
Love, love, <3 The Twitter Book
Wow, just got a print copy of The Twitter Book
by Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) and Sarah Milstein (@SarahM, user number 21 of Twitter). Thanks go to Andy Oram, @praxagora, for referring me to it after he read a draft of my upcoming book.
The layout, form factor, full-bleed color page numbers, and color screenshots and photos (Twitpics) throughout the interior are just wonderful. This design combination makes it an excellent hand-held object, worthy of being print-based! I’ll keep this one out in my living room. But I’m kind of nerdy that way.
It has important and useful information about Twitter (www.twitter.com) and why it’s so powerful. Just thumbing through it I found two things I didn’t know about Twitter (and I’ve been on Twitter as @annegentle since early 2007.) One is, it really is a big deal that Twitter removed the setting that allowed you to customize which @username replies you saw and your followers saw. There used to be three settings in the Settings>Notices tab (page , now there are none. But Twitter reversed the original policy decision, and Read Write Web gives a graphical explanation (it’s strange enough that it needs explanation.)
The second informative tip is that for the most part, people tweet the most on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. And most people, if they don’t see your tweet in the first five minutes of you posting it, won’t see it at all. I bet that the more uptake we have desktop grouping helpers like TweetDeck, the longer that tweet click-through duration will last. But even with better grouping so that you don’t miss tweets from people you really want to read, as more and more people join Twitter, it’s harder and harder to ensure you get the information you want. So you might want to think about using TweetLater to post a slightly re-worded micropost at another time.
I have to admit, I do like Chris Brogan’s idea of using the hashtag #getoffmylawn for celebrities who use Twitter in an annoying way. But better yet, have more and more people read The Twitter Book to get better and better at their Twitter use and micropost writing.
And finally, words to live by, in Chapter 3 “Hold Great Conversations.” On Twitter or any other community and communication site, it’s not about you! The best part is about contributing to the community – make a positive impact. “…the more value you create for the community, the more value it will create for you.”
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!
Casual users and Power users – what type of online help do they want?
I have been scanning through some of the presentations at the STC Summit that I had to miss due to the packed schedule, and Scott DeLoach’s presentation, Best Practices for Developing User Assistance caught my eye. He has slide after slide of Facts listed based on research in user assistance. Facts from those important and difficult-to-uncover research studies in the ways people read help and read on the web. The citations are excellent!
He starts by separating out the stages of use, saying 80% of your readers are in fact the casual user (novices and advanced beginners), and the other 20% are power users (competent performers, proficient performers, and expert performers). These definitions come from Dreyfus and Dreyfus’s Mind over Machine: the power of human intuition and expertise in the era of the computer.
The great thing about Scott’s presentation is that he offers citations for each of the claims he makes, even when (and especially when) there is a slight difference in interpretation that may affect your design or writing decisions.
Of special interest to me is his claim that the Power Users are the ones who want online communities. For some companies, I wonder if that means that building an online community is considered to be “icing on the cake” and a project that can’t be funded because it targets a smaller group of users. In companies with mature documentation sets, though, it seems like building an online community with the available tools would be a natural next step for technical writers.
What do you think? Do novices and beginners want a community online? Or are communities reserved for the power user?
I signed a book contract! Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation
I’m simply buzzing with excitement because the ink is drying on my first book contract, and it’s with XML Press with the capable Richard Hamilton at the helm.
The title is Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. Here’s the announcement and description of the book. I’m nearly done writing it, the designer (the very creative and talented digital artist Patrick Davison) is working on the cover and interior design.
I hope you’ll put it here (on your well-stocked bookshelf):
Bookshelf photo courtesy of Stewart on Flickr.
Though it’s completely possible you’ll put it here (handy at the side of your work station or on your computer):
Workstation photo courtesy of Travis Isaacs on Flickr.
I was asked earlier, why don’t you blog about the process of landing a book contract? I’d love to tell some great story about a bright response on how I brilliantly negotiated a book contract. But there is no such story. : ) I honestly think writing two blog entries a week for the last four years or so has been the best way to explain the point I’m at today with a book contract in hand! Look for the book this summer mid-2009, as I have an aggressive schedule going right now.
Handout download for Documentation with Blogs, Wikis, and Online Communities
Ah, when I typed the title in the Quick Press book I originally wrote, “Documentation with Blogs, Wiis, and Online Communities.” If only we could write documentation with the haptic Wii controller. Brings a whole new meaning to drag and drop.
I’ve uploaded a handout for the presentation that Janet Swisher and I just gave at the STC Summit. We only printed 20 copies but easily had 50+ and a standing-room only crowd! So please feel free to download and print this one-pager that contains links we referenced. And since you came to my blog to find this handout, you get an added bonus of the Social Technographics(tm) tool from the Groundswell authors, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.
Thanks to all who attended! Please fill out the speaker evaluation on the STC web site. Feel free to remind me that I talk too fast.
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.
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?
Embrace the “un”
An article that Janet Swisher and I wrote for STC Intercom magazine about unconferences, BarCamps, and Book Sprints is available as a PDF file from the stc.org site if you are an STC member. I have permission to post it as well, so click the image for a free download of the PDF file.
Janet and I collaborated on the article by using Google Docs and sharing the editing between us.
Here is an excerpt:
Embracing the Un — When the Community Runs the Event
While Web 2.0 has many definitions, it is fair to say that Web 2.0 involves embracing user-created content and the communities that emerge around that content. One aspect of being a member of a Web 2.0-enabled online community is the real world meetings that can happen at professional conferences or even networking events in your same town or city. User groups or focus groups are one type of real-world meeting, with a single goal in mind.
Unconferences and barcamps are another type of real-world event where people with similar interests and goals can get together to share information. A third type of community event has just emerged and this article highlights aspects this new BookSprint model because of its relevance to technical writing. This article describes the authors’ experiences with participating in these types of events, and in particular the FLOSS Manuals Book Sprint for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, held in August 2008.
How can we go towards documentation as conversation?
Tell me… and I will forget. Show me… and I will remember. Involve me… and I will understand.
-Confucius
Documentation as conversation means getting closer to the users and helping them perform well. Over the years experts such as JoAnn Hackos and Jared Spool have told us that this type of user-centered design and focus increases the quality of documentation.
H. Allen Brizee and Katy A. Schmaling wrote “Effective Workplace Writing” as a resource for the Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL), and they say “In the last twenty years, two important ideas have developed that help professionals compose effective workplace writing: rhetorical awareness, and user-centered design.” In my mind and from what I read, user-centered design is consistently related to Web 2.0 definitions. Where Web 1.0 merely served information blindly, Web 2.0 gives users a chance to interact with the information and each other using the web.
Taking off from the concept of user-center design, I’d like to talk about how to get even closer with real customers by starting conversations and enabling user assistance in interactions with users with a series of blog entries on documentation, conversation, and community.
Professional writers have more conversation-starting tools at their disposal than any other time in history. Techniques may include the use of blogs, wikis, forums, and social networking sites, but may also involve photos, simple stick figure illustrations, videos, virtual worlds, or instant messaging. What are your thoughts on a blog series to discuss modern methods for involving readers in the conversation surrounding technical documentation?
Anne Gentle is the author of 
