The state of free documentation

That’s free as in freedom, and today’s post includes a link to Adam Hyde’s blog entry of the same title on FLOSS Manuals and some response based on my experiences so far.

What motivates people to contribute to documentation projects for free? Is the documentation actually free as in no-cost? I’ll speak from my own experience and draw from recent research in this area. Plus, I just read Chris Anderson’s excellent essay on free as a business model and learned about the multiple economies and values and currencies available to us today such as the gift economy or labor exchange.

In my Wiki-fy your doc set presentation, I talk about the motivations for people contributing to any online or community documentation, and these four categories apply for any online community, be it a wiki or a mailing list:

1. reciprocity
2. reputation
3. efficacy
4. feeling like you belong or identify with a group or cause.

These four categories explain why people are motivated to contribute for no pay (for free) to a documentation project. This poster presentation for a “General Online Research” conference 2008, GOR 08, offers even more insight into contributions to Wikipedia as well as reasons people cite for not contributing content but reading only. Now, I agree with Stewart Mader that “your (enterprise) wiki is not Wikipedia” but there are lessons to be learned from Wikipedia as well. Take a look at what they found motivated contributors:

Rank Motive
3.71 Free access to knowledge for everyone
5.15 Task enjoyment / Fun
5.33 Learning
6.55 Belief in the future of Wikipedia
6.69 Existing information was inaccurate
7.25 Quality improvement of Wikipedia

At the unconference last week, Tom Johnson asked me, why did you get started with documenting the OLPC project? My initial motivation was that someone who I used to work for asked me, and he works for Joann Hackos. So reputation was one motivating factor, but as I read more and more about the education goals of the OLPC project on laptop.org, the more I saw it as an opportunity to identify with an education cause especially as related to my own kids computer educations and expanding their horizons beyond Windows. Why are any of us interested in documenting a complex product or process? It’s possible that at the heart of our motivation is recognition or reward in terms of money or success. But, an underlying motivator for many technical writers is that we like to help others learn, which ties into my education motives. We may also think that writing and communicating with images, audio, or video is a great way to make a living. What I am observing more lately is that community members want to write or share content as well.

Last year, O’Reilly ran a survey asking about the motivations that people have for contributing to online documentation, be it via a forum, a mailing list, or a web site. With 354 responses, I’m sure there’s a wide variety of answers, but certainly some patterns emerged. Andy Oram dissects them in a five plus page article. My favorite line on the first page is “And while fixes to particular errors are easy to convey, best practices are not.”

His report contains many findings that are unique, because no one else had been asking the questions. What he found that surprised me was:

• People surveyed don’t think they are contributing to the documentation
• People surveyed didn’t think of themselves as writers

Indeed, community building is the more important ranked reason for contributing to online documentation, rather than personal growth.

I have seen that rather than the monetary gains you can make by freelancing documentation, the currency of community is a payment schedule all on its own right.

The “free” offerings represent a shift in thinking. It’s not that no one paid for the doc to receive it. Nor did anyone get paid to write it. But the infrastructure in place enabled a sense of free-ness, freedom, and lack of cost. In reality, an elite group of people who have computers (starting at US$600 or so) and pay US$40 a month for Internet connections trade in t their time and knowledge in hopes of getting repaid in time and knowledge, recognition, a sense of belonging, or a payback in time by being more efficient.

This shift represents a new economy for documentation. Payment is in a different, “free,” no monetary cost form.

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The Rockley Blog - wiki’s delivery mechanisms

I’m thoroughly enjoying the new Rockley Blog at http://rockley.com/blog/. I’m so glad Steve Manning and Ann Rockley are blogging, especially about wikis.

I appreciated Steve’s post “Wikis for Documentation” especially where he says that the delivery side is the weak point still. Agreed, but I have seen pockets of improvement there and need to be blogging heartily about them.

About three years ago I was equally as unconvinced of a wikis usefulness for end-user doc. An Agile-advocating developer mentioned the idea of using wikis so that the end-user doc could stay in sync with their fast Agile iterations. Yipes I thought! Wikis did work well for convincing the developers to contribute their knowledge, though, and internally they became a useful knowledge sharing (and finding) system.

Now I’m starting to see more and more actual customer need for them. I just had a great discussion about the difference between what a customer needs and what a customer thinks he or she wants, though, so some of what’s necessary is interpreting whether a wiki can fulfill a customer need. I got a small chuckle out of the title of this blog entry - Wikify Documentum Already - but he’s talking precisely about the gains you and your customers make when documentation is in a wiki. The interesting momentum going now is whether the current large enterprise content management systems can start to see the value in a wiki output, or whether the wiki engine providers themselves are going to catch up with the full feature set available in the large enterprise systems.

But wow, I’m learning how difficult wiki maintenance and trust patterns can be while using the wiki.laptop.org site to help out with their end-user doc. In some ways, wiki doc is more difficult than using the real CMS tools that we’ve become accustomed to (read: spoiled by). But I’m also learning how amazing the collaboration opportunities are when using a wiki. I’m still marveling at the communication going on in the discussion pages as well as the volunteer spirit that has come through a request on an art network.

So, what to do to get decent output for content delivery using the multiple channels that us advanced single-sourcers are already accustomed to? I’m planning to move the XO’s end-user doc towards the Flossmanuals.net model of a highly customized Twiki implementation where you can get and print a PDF from the wiki. I can’t wait to learn more and I’ll blog about it as I find out. It’s a step in that direction, though, where you deliver user guides and online help and web sites tailored to the needs of specific audiences. Language translations in a highly distributed environment are going to be an important part of the project, and I’m curious about how Flossmanuals provides for that aspect.

I’ve learned that you can write a Confluence plug-in that will take DITA source and turn it into wiki text. Confluence has PDF output capability as well, so it’s another step in the right direction to get that just-in-time content delivery that a customer needs (but doesn’t know that they want.)

Putting documentation in a wiki (or any really-well-indexed web location, really) can increase findability. If you get internal comments that say “you haven’t documented this particular feature enough” and you feel the feature is sufficiently documented, examine the findability of your documentation.

Also in our user advocacy role we are learning how to listen to customers and then interpret their needs. As information acquisition continues to gather speed, we not only provide the information but should also make informed choices about delivery methods.

Examples of what a customer wants but might not know that a wiki can deliver:

• What’s new with the product?
• How do I interact with documentation, support, the company represented as an actual live person?
• I want immediate information updates.
• I want to discuss the nuances of an implementation decision.
• I need to find others who are attempting what I am in the same type of field (insurance or banking).

What are your thoughts? Are we spoiled by our advanced delivery systems and waiting for wiki engines to catch up? Or are wiki authoring and delivery systems already giving us collaborative opportunities that are unparalleled?

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