I mentioned this in passing last week but having had a little time to delve into the model in a little more depth I thought it was worth re-visiting.

The DITA Maturity Model as an organic model that is still being developed. Rather smartly it’s presented in Wiki format allowing anyone who is interested to comment and debate any and all of the content.

The model itself follows a familiar pattern with six levels of maturity against which you can map where you and your organisation sit. However the DITA Maturity Model starts with the presumption that you are already committed to topic-based writing, and I think that’s a gap that needs to be addressed.

For me, the model allows me to explain to my boss (and his boss) why investing in DITA as a document schema is worthwhile but it misses the gap of why we should change what we are doing at all. Once you have made the leap, the maturity model is all well and good but MAKING the leap in the first place, well that can be considerably harder.

Of course I’m not the only person who realises this, and in steps the DITA Wiki which has an entire section on building the business case for DITA.

The DITA Wiki is interesting. Not only is it chock full of useful information but ALL the major players in the single source/content reuse arena contribute to the content and discussions. Again it’s telling that it grew up alongside the growth of DITA usage.

Anyway, the DITA Maturity Model is definitely worth a look if you are considering heading down the DITA road. If nothing else it will give you a better understanding of the road ahead, some of the pitfalls you will encounter and the benefits you will gain.

Since the turn of the year I’ve been thinking a lot about online communities and let me just say, right here and now, they are bloody hard to get your head around. I’m pulling together a developer community website for my company, with technical information and knowledge sharing being the core aims. It’ll be used by customers, partners and our own internal staff (fingers crossed!).

The simplest part to digest is the technological aspects, as you can map your requirements directly and let that drive your choice of tool. You can make decisions based on feedback from prospective users and ultimately most tools can be made to do what you want (ohh didn’t I say, this is utopia where you get all the resources and time you need… ahem).

Content is another thing to consider, with both the creation and manipulation of content key to making sure your new website thrives. I’m planning ahead and hope to have a few articles that can be published at a regular rate and then see where it goes after that. I’m certainly hoping that it won’t solely be a push driven website.

Audience next, and luckily for me I’ve a fairly good idea of the scope of the audience. They’ll be technically minded, as it’s a developer community, and I’m going to be playing on that as much as I can. From the SUPA event I attended a few weeks back – – “some of the aspects of web 2.0 communities, and how providing ‘achievement motivation’ is a key method for enabling learning and helping build the ‘need for mastery’ ”

At this point it becomes a little harder to predict what the community will want from a website. I’m happy to adapt plans and add new features if required but I need to make sure that, from the outset, there is enough ’stuff’ to attract repeat visits to the website.

And this is the point where my train of thought leaps the rails as I veer from how to manage the new content (where is it created and stored? WHO creates it? who OWNS it?), how to manage the current/legacy content, how to enable the community, how to sustain activity, how to tie the website into our corporate presence, how to creates paths of information and support informal learning, how to allow sharing of ideas with a level of control (or none?) and on and on. It’s a very long list that grows every time I look at it.

Thankfully there are many good examples of online communities that work. However the one disadvantage we have is that the bulk of our audience (our own staff) already have resources they use for this type of interaction – internal mailing lists – and shifting them to the developer community will be a challenge.

Further reading:
The architecture of participation
Here comes everybody
Clay Shirky talks about his book, Here Comes Everybody (vid)
Interview: User participation and social networking (MP3)

One of the reasons DITA has gained so much traction in such a short space of time is that the people behind it are taking advantage of the internet to publicise and drive it forward. With that in mind it’s great to see them open the new DITA Maturity Model out to the community:

This community is designed to bring the DITA Maturity Model to life, applying the “Wisdom of the Crowds” to the evolution and refinement of this approach to DITA adoption. The premise is that none of us is as good as all of us. The DITA MMC is an evolving resource that will grow and change over time with your active participation and contributions.

Definitely a good usage of the social media tools available at the moment.

One thing that struck me, taken from the Content Wrangler coverage, is a simple reason as to why more people are considering a move towards DITA-based content:

Enterprises looking to fast track their content strategy and minimize the risks of a big-bang initiative are choosing DITA–one of the most popular information models to suit today’s content–rich, multi-channel environment.

For some reason I hadn’t quite figured that out, but if you are putting together a business case built around DITA then it’s worth investigating this in more depth. That said, this is definitely one of those “so obvious I hadn’t considered it” moments!

The maturity model also highlights one of the reasons that DITA is proving popular even if it isn’t the best standard to be using for every circumstance. Quite simply, it’s because it’s young, new and (this is the important bit) is being developed in plain view of everyone on the internet. Admittedly I’ve not gone looking for DocBook or SD1000 resources but as they are already fairly mature they seem to be struggling to keep up with the pace of development around DITA. If DITA is the cool kid on the block, DocBook is definitely the wise old sage, stooped on the corner.

Social media on the internet thrives on participation and with DITA still growing up everyone has a chance to get involved and influence things, and that helps generate buy-in, which drives more improvements, which increases community buy-in… and so on.

So, even if you aren’t interested in DITA but are interested in how social media (online communities, web 2.0, whatever you want to call it) might help you and your company, it might be worth while checking out the maturity model and see if the same … erm… model.. can be applied to what you do.

This post has been bubbling for the past year or so, ever since I started this blog. It’s a bit of a ramble but if I don’t publish it now I’ll just keep adding to it and it’s long enough as it is!

I question everything. It’s part of the way my mind works, and is something I’ve embraced and believe it makes me better at my job as a technical communicator. That attitude has also helped me realise that there is a common thread that can be found across several different areas of our industry, which I (and others) are slowly pulling together. Convergence is the word that springs to mind, and as businesses clamber onto the social networking bandwagon, now is an excellent time to grab the reigns and take control.

Let’s step back a little.

Late last year, on two separate mailing lists, I followed discussions about what the myriad of people who share my profession have as job titles. I prompted one discussion on the ISTC mailing list, and chipped in some thoughts on the TechWR mailing list before dropping out later on when the noise ratio, as ever, got too high.

I wonder how much useful information I miss when I do that? Ahhh something else to ponder. But not today.

Anyway, discussions around how we as a profession should be referring to ourselves, envitably leads to discussions and thoughts about what we do, where our skills lie, and the benefits we can bring to an organisation. Something I’ve toyed with before, but which is wrapped up in many layers of ifs, buts and other such caveats.

Following on from that, I read an article by Virginia Lynch in the CIDM newsletter (and if you aren’t subscribed to their newsletter, you should be) entitled Information Developers – The New Role of Technical Writers in a Flat World which encapsulates a lot of my current thinking on how to take my current team forward, making sure we are matching company strategy whilst allowing the team members to retain a focus on maintaining and developing their core skills. The article title rather neatly alludes to Thomas Friedman’s book The World Is Flat: The Globalized World in the Twenty-first Century which is certainly worth a read.

Virginia mentions that JoAnn Hackos recently referred to these core skills as “Basic Hygiene”, citing the fact that, regardless of how the collation and production, distribution and usage of information may change, as we explore the burgeoning arena of new tools available to us under the banner of “social web applications” our core skills remain. Typically they tend to drop off as we are pushed to create more, faster, with a rise in quantity favoured over a maintenance of quality.

style, grammar, punctuation, spelling, and even clarity seem to have been sacrificed for quantity —JoAnn points out that knowledge of basic writing skills is still critical to our success as writers. Basic Hygiene also comprises an understanding and appreciation of editing, the information development life cycle, fundamental web and computer skills, and of course attention to detail.

However it is important to note the nod towards quantity being a business leader, and those of us tasked with managing a team need to consider how we achieve that business aim, without impacting our integrity as Technical Writ… umm… Information Developers?

So, how do we produce more whilst maintaining quality?

Wait! What’s that coming over the hill? Ahhh yes, the shining white knight of single source, armour gleaming, his trusty DITA (or DocBook) in hand, ready to do battle against the ills of productivity measurements and over-zealous QA departments. What else were you expecting? Ohh more resource? No, not these days when everyone is a “content creator”, not these days when we should be embracing and encouraging our audience to help plug the gaps in our information dykes (I really must stop mixing my metaphors).

Topic-based writing certainly seems to tick the required boxes and every business case and ROI I’ve read (and I’ve written a couple myself) points us towards the promises found over the horizon and the “he’ll be here real soon, honest” arrival of the aforementioned white knight. The trouble is that, whilst it is easy to agree with the theory, I’m not all that sure the white knight is all he seems. Certainly as we climb the hill towards him, auditing our content, deciding on chunking levels, agreeing metadata requirements, we begin to see that that armour seems a little thin and dented in areas, and I’m not entirely sure the knight is filling that armour as much as he should. Aren’t they supposed to be big strapping warriors? He looks a little weedy to me…

Topic driven content written with a minimalist slant, deferring here to the instructions of Strunk and White* rather than Roy Carroll, are where we seem to be (need to be?) heading and that’s fine and good from where I’m sitting.

* A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid detail and treat his subject only in outline, but that every word tell.

On the flip side, there is a definite growth in awareness around the use of Web 2.0 technologies and systems, building online communities, integrating Wikis, blogs, RSS feeds into the information flow either as part of end user deliverables or as methods for encouraging information creation by everyone involved with the product, internal or external.

A large part of our job concerns the collation and filtering of information so as far as I’m concerned anything we can do to make the creation of source information easier has to be welcomed. Extending these mechanisms beyond internal usage means it should be easier to provide information to the people who really need it, with the added bonus of a greater level of trust in that information. Don’t believe me? Which type of information do you put most weight on, the information passed to you by a trusted colleague who you know uses the product heavily, or the product documentation? (and bear in mind that we technical writers pre-disposed to favour the work of our peers). That in itself is another issue which may be alleviated by embracing social content creation, pulling on the goodwill generated by openly inviting contribution and collaboration, whilst giving technical writers a chance to show their worth in full public view.

So where is all this heading? I’m not sure if anyone is too sure but there do seem to be some trends appearing. The use of Wikis to host documentation, the creation of community websites with few restrictions, and more. There are plenty of tools, and with a little work you can get them talking to each other. Technology is not the limiting factor anymore, attitudes are now the only things stopping us trying these wonderous new things. It’s a big step for some companies, and some people, to free their information, to pass their hard earned knowledge about willy-nilly without a clue as to how it will be used.

Once you’ve gotten past the limitations, the real effort, once you have your community or collaboration up and running, is the surrounding processes. Do you want to pump content into the website regularly? (yes). Do you want to allow anyone and everyone to contribute to that same store of information? (yes). Do you want to allow others to quietly correct your mistakes? (yes). Do you want to give the people who need it, access to information about your product, regardless where it originates, trusting them to use their judgement? (yes).

The final pieces of the jigsaw are the finer details of implementation. Presuming we want to reuse information as often as possible where do you store information and how do you allow access to it? Who should be involved in verifying new information? Where/how is the level of trust established?

Pulling together the threads of this emerging role is tricky, with so much overlap into multiple areas and so much to consider there is a danger of not seeing the wood for the trees. This post is an attempt to step back and make a little more sense of what I can see, what I know, and the changes starting to drag our profession in interesting new directions. I fear I may have muddied the waters, but hopefully they’ll settle and things will start to make sense.

Regardless of whether I’m right or wrong, one thing is for sure, these are exciting times and we have a great opportunity to finally leverage technical communications into the spotlight. The value of information is finally being properly realised, and we are ideally placed to help any organisation make the most of what information they have and help them understand and create the information they really need.

The timing of this post, and the announcement by the Cherryleaf blog that they’ve created a Facebook group for technical authors, is completely coincidental. However there does seem to be a genuine move towards online communities, or perhaps it’s just the latest fad?

It’s an interesting time to be building an online community, and I’m lucky that I can pull from the past ten years or so that I’ve had an online presence.

When blogging first started there were few tools available, but in a short space of time they started cropping up all over the place and these days there are many different ways you can post to your blog (as well as many different ways/places to host it). The same seems to be true of the current rise of “social networking” sites.

Places like MySpace and Bebo focussed on the network surrounding one entity, whilst FaceBook and LinkedIn focus on central groups, and finally services like Ning allow you to build an entire specialised community which can then focus in on central areas of commonality.

I have a LinkedIn profile, a Facebook profile and I’m a member of a Ning community, and for me they represent different things. Ohh and please don’t be offend if I don’t “friend” you on any of those websites, I do try and keep that sort of thing under control.

For me LinkedIn is, in essence, a smart contact manager that allows me to find other people related to previous places of employment or study, whereas Facebook is something I dip in and out of and which I primarily use to keep in touch with friends and other personal/social goings-on. Ning, specifically the Content Wrangler community, is very much focussed on my profession and is a good way to interact with my peers across the globe.

I’m wondering if my perception of these sites are common? The reason I ask is that whilst creating a group on Facebook or LinkedIn is very easy, perhaps the usage of such sites needs to be considered. There has been a lot of chat about companies starting to “lever” these websites, alienating users/customers. So it definitely isn’t just me that has a fixed idea about for what these websites should be used.

I’m in the midst of trying to build an online community for the technical users of our product, and I’m very conscious of the unwritten rules and presumptions that go hand in hand with how people act online, and which boundaries need to be respected. It’s a balancing act, that’s for sure, but a fascinating one.

A phrase I spotted online the other day rings true: “someone hit them with the Web 2.0 stick”. I’m a big fan of Wikis, blogging and online communities, and I think they offer some excellent ways to be part of the conversation, but perhaps we all need to step back a little and make sure that the tools we are using are the right ones for the job.

The boom of the internet is better documented elsewhere but the one key and founding principles is the ability to converse with anyone, anywhere in the globe. From the early days of IRC and email, onto graphical websites and instant messaging through to the current swathe of, for want of a better phrase, Web 2.0 services.

Twitter, blogs, social bookmarking, and online communities are the current rage but, do they work?

I’m a member of several email lists, swapping emails with a large number of people on a range of topics. I spend a fair amount of time filtering out topics which don’t interest me, and over time I’ve come to recognise various people by name. However email, whilst great for sharing information, is a limited when it comes to building communities.

Understanding who you are conversing with and the additional interests they have helps build trust, helps build better conversations and helps build communities. Transferring that kind of interaction online means we can better leverage shared experiences and hopefully make it easier to find other people with the same, unique, slice of knowledge and interests.

It’s only now, pulling together all the available technologies that such online communities are possible.

And the good news is that we, as technical communicators (content professionals) now have such a community.

Scott Abel, aka the Content Wrangler, has launched the Content Wrangler Community website and, having signed up and started using it a little I have to say that it is well worth a look. There are already several hundred members (825 at present), and these early adopters have started forming focussed groups, all of which relate back to our profession. In the words of the website:

Network with peers. Find jobs. Share information. Start a blog. Upload and watch videos. Join a group. Begin a discussion. Learn about software. Find events. Ask for help. It’s all here. Become a member. It’s free!

It’s safe to say that “social networks” aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I’d strongly urge you to check it out. Despite only having been launched a couple of weeks ago, it’s already proving popular and, as the conversations start and people start to find clever ways of using the various features available then it’s only going to get better and better.

Visit the Content Wrangler Community website today, sign up and join in!

Having been off ill for a couple of weeks, almost completely off-line for that time, I’m still catching up with work and my blog reading. The beauty of monitoring RSS feeds is that all I need to do is check through my unread items list in Google Reader and, finally, it’s approaching zero.

Over on the right you can download a file which contains links to all the RSS feeds I monitor (it’s an OPML file and most RSS feed reading applications will be able to import it). That said I am always on the lookout for more good quality blogs in the area of technical communications, design, information development and anything else that may be of interest. If you have any favourites you think I, and everyone else, would enjoy, please let me know by leaving a comment.

There is another reason for this, namely that I’m about to start writing a monthly summary of what is going on in the technical communications blogosphere. And that’s the last time I’ll be using that horrible word.