If there ever could be a Cliff’s Notes for the wiki chapter of my book, I think I’m writing it now. I’ve been working on a great project with MindTouch. I visited them for a focus group with other technical communicators and technical support pros back in February in San Diego. We had open source community documentation represented, we had the health information industry represented, cloud computing, and high tech software writers, Agile writers, and document collaborators. It was a great time, discussing tips, tricks, and the trials of managing lots of content with specific purposes in mind such as learning, education, customer support, technical support, and internal collaboration. The write-up for how to run a focus group of this type is quite good – see Seek Omega: How to hold a Professional Focus Group that Produces Quantifiable Results.
After such a great session, we all continue to talk online thanks to one of the members setting up a LinkedIn Group, and MindTouch also invited us to work on a project to write up specifications for using wikis for technical documentation. We’re basically creating best practices using wikis for documentation, such as:
- templates, such as DITA’s concept/task/reference as well as FAQ and solution guidance through multiple tasks
- tags for workflow, assigning tasks, editing, and categorizing pages
- content collection and curation
- reports that assist with content curation and community documentation
I’ve been circling back with the members of the focus group while I write these specs, and working with Steve Bjorg, the CTO for MindTouch. His attitude towards development is, create something with a sense of openess and collaborate with users as early as you can. It’s a refreshing way to make software. He describes these first go-rounds as the “Cliff’s Notes” for creating technical documentation with wikis. It’s not as robust as other solutions yet, but it sure does have features that are exciting glimpses at the future of documentation. I’ll post more in the coming weeks and months as we round out the features.