I’m participating in a Content Strategy Progression as described on the STC Content Strategy Special Interest Group blog entry on said progression. I’ll talk about content that is “Shareable, Searchable, Sociable, and Don’t Forget Syndicated.” That should be a fun session, and I’m just sad I won’t be able to wander around the room myself and soak in the Content Strategy goodness!

My proposal for a presentation titled, “Strategies for the Social Web for Documentation” was accepted, hurrah. Here’s what I have as learning objectives for the session, but I’d love to hear your questions as well before I prepare all the slidedeck. What would you want to learn?

Session Objectives:

1. Identify specific types of tools on the social web, such as tags, blogs, and wikis
2. List risk areas and pitfalls
3. Identify writers’ roles with social media (instigator or enabler)
4. Plan a strategy of listening, participating, building and then offering a platform or community

Session Description:
Let’s say that the most driven and driving developer on your team, who also happens to be a popular blogger, comes to you and asks why your end-user documentation doesn’t allow comments or ratings. Rather than stammering something about Wikipedia’s latest scandal, or reaching for imperfect responses that sound like lame excuses, do your homework and learn best practices from others who are implementing social web content that is conversational or based on community goals. Along the way you may realize there are good reasons not to implement a social media strategy, based on studying the potential community and time you’d spend in arbitration with community members on contentious issues, or you may discover that you can borrow from benefits of a single approach while still meeting business goals.

(Kudos if you recognize the song lyrics to which the title and lead refer.)

I arrived and signed in and was standing in front of the board right when the orientation ended – and suddenly was surrounded by bar campers looking at the board with me. There was a good variety of topics – updated to add a link to the Flickr photo set with pictures of all the Post-it notes on the board and screenshot of the set.

Austin – experiencing community in the Open City

I decided to first attend a session called “Plug into Austin’s Web/Interactive Scene” with Austinites Steve Golab and Marcus Mateus. They had a presentation talking about the connections we can make in Austin that may not be available in other cities. Austin has a unique vibe, with slogans like “Keep Austin Weird” and events like SXSW Interactive. We support the creative class as described by Richard Florida quite nicely. In Austin it’s cool to be smart, and we are the chosen location for over 6,000 non profits. They’re active in the Bootstrap Austin community. I learned that “Experiences make us happier than possessions” from a CNN article, after they introduced the concept of an Experience Economy. We talked about some of the experience-centered businesses in Austin, from Alamo Drafthouse, a movie theater that serves food and drinks during the flick, to Groovy Lube, an automotive shop with a groovy vibe, After another person’s comment that where you’re sure to be serviced by a hippy-type mechanic at Groovy Lube, about I wondered aloud if the employee experiences is just as important and part of the branding as much as the customer or participants experience. I think Zappo’s is a good example of an employee’s experience mattering as much to the brand as the customer. So, can nonprofits offer experiences? The speakers suggest you could aggregate communities to make a “scene.”

Google Analytics demonstration

For the next session, I ended up offering to demonstrate Google Analytics – someone had put up a Post-it with “Want: Google Analytics Overview” on it for an 11:15 slot, and at 11:14 I decided to volunteer. At first it was just me and one other person, but then at least a dozen people joined us. One woman from Settlement Home, was able to demonstrate their Google Analytics implementation. She worked with Trademark Media to get their tracking codes set up. She was able to pull up her Dashboard and show the last month’s worth of visitors and so on. We walked through the various areas of Google Analytics – Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content, and Goals – with stories from many of the participants about what has worked well for them. I especially liked the funnel visualization for tracking the completion of a volunteer application. Our Internet connection was flaky for the first 10-15 minutes, but Chris Boyd, who works at Midas Networks, the ISP for my site, by the way, got us up and running.

One of our discussions was about trying to find out what to measure. One non profit had just started using Google Analytics. With non profits, I believe the goals aren’t always about conversions into sales. The prospects turn into clients or donors or volunteers, instead of customers who make a purchase. So after the session was over, I gathered these thoughts about persona-based goals for websites and tracking.

Personas are profiles of people who connect with your organization. They can be highly detailed, are profiles of imaginary people who mimic real-life people that you know, and are captured in a short report typically. I think that personas would make sense for figuring out the goals you have with web analytics and tracking. Based on looking at Any Baby Can, for example, you may have three personas: donors, volunteers, and clients. They’re going to know way more than I do about their goals, naturally , but here are some ideas:

Donor persona – some donors want to remain anonymous, is your pathway through your web content giving them that ability? Or if they are the opposite donor type, and want recognition for their contributions, can you track goals on your website that help with that?

Volunteer persona – What are some other goals that a volunteer wants to complete when they come to your website? Do they have a certain day of the week free and want to find opportunities for that day? Did they attend another event and want to find related opportunities?

Client persona – She may be using a public computer, are there particular pathways or goals you can outline and measure? Is the website useful not just for finding information as a potential client, but how is it serving current clients?

These are likely simplistic, but I wanted to share – I had one of those “oh, shoot, I could have described personas” moments after I left bar camp.

At the very end of the session, I mentioned that I just learned about negative keywords. These are keywords that you use in Adwords campaigns to make sure that your ads don’t show for search queries containing that a certain phrase. That way, people only click through on specific keywords, not related keywords that may not be a good match. A good negative keyword example for Settlement Home (if they started an AdWords Campaign or a pay-per-click campaign), for example, would be “foster dogs” to make sure people looking to foster dogs rather than children not see their ads about foster homes. One non profit was going to apply for an AdWords grant, so hopefully she’ll learn about negative keywords through their strong education program.

Keynote speaker – Holly Ross from NTEN

While I didn’t get to stay for the keynote, the Twitter feed for #npocamp during Holly Ross’s remote keynote was great to follow. One of the more interesting points to me that she made that was tweeted about is that there’s a huge increase (like 600%?) in unstructured data. These are the scattered conversations and communications happening all over the Internet, apparently. How can non profits analyze or monitor unstructured data? Two suggestions came from the person I sat next to in the first session, Gregory Foster: Scout Labs and Radian6.

Summary

What a great way to spend a Saturday morning with energetic, positive people making a difference for people especially using technology and communities. A bar camp, with its unstructured format, was a perfect match for this group.

What does this research mean for user assistance delivered through social means?

Voice matters – People wanted a specific voice for certain corporate brands. For example, the BBC was thought that it should have a more professional voice in its messages. But for other corporate brands, people wanted a more casual style, but the biggest reason for unfollowing a company rep on a social networking site was annoyance at the frequency of posting. My thinking? Don’t post your entire release notes links via Twitter in a week – instead spread them out to avoid drowning out the other people that your readers are also interacting with. I talk about finding your voice in chapter 7 of my book, and this research finding is certainly relevant.

Consider context – Updates that came through RSS rather than social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, were thought to be more “official” and trustworthy. However, readers have a lot more control over what they see – and readers who read the second page of a stream are nearly unheard of. They don’t seek out past postings. I have seen this happen on my blog here at JustWriteClick – once a post drops off that first page of about 10 posts, it’s only seen again when someone from a search engine looks for something very specific, such as the End-user Documentation in an Agile Environment post. What else is interesting about offering RSS feeds for information is that users’ habits haven’t changed in 3 years, though RSS use is on the rise and people are selective of the feeds they track.

Keep up – Twitter and Facebook are sites that are visited daily – can you keep up if you decide to engage customers there? And is there a place for end-user documentation on these sites? My take is that you shouldn’t start unless you’re willing to keep up. And in many cases, you probably don’t need to start on certain social network sites. If your group haa corporate goals like maintaining customer support by tying the social network interaction very tightly with your end-user documentation, then Twitter or LinkedIn may be a good match. Facebook may be a match also, depending on your message. Non profits, for example, find Facebook a great match for education, training, or raising awareness. If your corporate alignment as a technical writer is with the training and education department, you may find a niche case for using Facebook for promoting learning opportunites.

Make it useful - The most successful messages had substance, were timely, and met users expectations. Message usefulness scored the lowest of all the categories. Yikes. I would hope that as more content strategists and technical communicators apply their skillset to these messages, we can increase the utility.

Write well – Writing specifically for the medium is important to get the results you want. Probably the best way to write well for the medium is to read as much content as you can in the targeted medium. Apparently you can’t just repurpose content or use shortened text snippets that point to a longer one – users won’t click through.

Mobile findings

Only 4% of the users involved in the study sought out corporate messages from a mobile device. What I might infer from that finding is that mobile devices are for necessary in-field information, not for corporate messages syndicated through RSS or posted to social networks.

Email still fits

I found it interesting that email messages and newsletters may still be the best way to maintain customer relationships. Even though the user is responsible for deleting those messages, requiring more “work” than social networking sites, users still don’t browse through multiple messages from corporate “streams.”

Nielson’s summary says it so very succinctly that I can’t help but quote it directly:

Summary:
Users like the simplicity of messages that pass into oblivion over time, but were frequently frustrated by unscannable writing, overly frequent postings, and their inability to locate companies on social networks.

When I’ve read Agile practitioner reports that tell tales of times when technical writers have left meetings and fled to cry, I am not just surprised but a little dismayed.In A Tale of Two Writing Teams from an Agile conference three years ago, one anonymous writing team reported one writer in particular crying during the daily standup and in retrospectives.

As the prioritization changed from the new Java web program (the new and fun stuff) to updating the old, stuffy legacy client server code, writers’ tasks switched from creating new online Help to updating old versions of end-user documentation (books). This change caused the writing team to revert to form—that is, they began to demand written design specs. It’s as if once the technology took a step back from online Help to written documentation because of the prioritization of the product backlog, so did the methodology choice. I tried my best to coach the writers to work creatively with developers on the old stuff as they had on the new, but there was an insistence that the existing specs
for the old legacy code would now become outdated, and the writers were completely uncomfortable with that. One writer—the one with the most tenure—
moved out of the team room, citing lack of privacy and her ability to contribute as the reasons (when I know that it was really a lack of embracing the change). I can remember several episodes of her crying during daily scrum meetings and in
retrospectives.

The paper author’s analysis indicates that the stress of embracing change caused the outburst I think the stress of change can bring on an emotional outburst, and sometimes people have crying as their stress release.

But what is more interesting to me as a content provider is that the change in the tools used to deliver the documentation seemed to correlate to the writer’s work habits. As I search for wiki solutions for collaborative authoring on Agile teams, I’m reminded of this article again and again. There’s no crying in Agile, and having an Agile documentation tool should help with change management. Except, of course, the change management associated with bringing in a wiki. Stewart Mader had great suggestions at the recent WebWorks Roundup: make wiki upkeep part of everyone’s job, make it as easy as email, and make it as sociable and enjoyable as riding the train to work each day. Any other ideas? I’d love to hear them.

Why consistency?

You may not be a big fan, especially if you’re a creative type, because you appreciate when something interesting and new pops out at you. Unfortunately, you may be one of the few who appreciates something popping out while they’re trying to learn a task or evaluate a concept or analyze a pending purchase. I don’t believe consistency has to mean “dull” but I do believe consistency gives you expected results both in reading paragraphs and in overall organization.

SkyMall – catalog copy example

For some reason, this bit of catalog copy stopped me in my tracks while I was reading the latest SkyMall, waiting for my plane to take off.
Catalog copy for a watch description:

When you want to raise some eyebrows or have an excellent ice breaker for you next sales meeting, the jaw dropping Gforce MatrixPC is your best resource. The stunning design will tell people that you are someone who is confident, secure, and successful; all traits that will attract the right people into your life. The MatrixPC makes everyone aware that you know what it takes in life.

The last sentence was the most jarring, I suppose. Compared to other catalog copy in the same publication, this one struck me as sloppy, not tight.

Little House on the Prairie – narrative example

I’m re-reading the Little House on the Prairie books as an adult after loving them as a child. This time through, though, I’m amazed at the differences in style and tone and the placement of quite technical descriptions of cheese making, contrasted with stories of children not listening to their parents. I didn’t notice these differences in voice and style as a child, but as a grown-up this roller coaster reading was making me a little nauseous.

Then I learned from this New Yorker article, Wilder Women: The mother and daughter behind the Little House stories that Rose Wilder added much of the “flourish” to the books before they would even be considered for publication. Fascinating. The books still hold together and offer a wonderful viewpoint into American history. But there will always be that reader experience of the feeling some paragraphs are misplaced.

How to achieve consistency with community writing projects

On the FLOSS Manuals site, Adam Hyde writes about tone and style swings in the Book Sprints book, saying:

A book can be frustrating if it switches tone in the middle. One author may write in a jazzy, loose style, such as “Don’t panic–we’ll reveal the wizardry in a minute,” while another might write in a more formal style, saying “The following example is complex, but will be understandable by the time you finish the chapter.” Each style is legitimate and useful, but the reader will feel queasy if the tone makes a big swing from one style to another.

I think that “queasy” feeling is one you want to avoid for your readers.

We’ve worked through this for book sprints with a couple of different techniques to ensure consistency in style, tone, and organization.

One is to hire an off-site editor who reviews and modifies new content nightly during a book sprint. By having that person be off-site, they do not get caught up into the intense group dynamics that happen during the sprint, which is such a focused documentation and working group that they may argue unnecessarily about edits.

Another technique is to start writers out with a simple style guide.On the FLOSS Manuals site, each manual has a link to Agreed conventions for writing this manual. It’s not complicated but it does give writers an idea of what expectations they should meet when writing content.

For book sprints, we outline ahead of time, using simple Post-it notes or even laying out paper printouts on the floor.

These chapter or topic titles will give writers an idea of what type of chunking of information we’d expect for the manual.

And lastly, lead by example. By providing copy in the style and tone that you expect the entire body of work to follow, other writers are more likely to follow suit.

Is Twitter appropriate for conversation and collaboration?

Tonight I’m reading a paper titled “Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter” originally published in the proceedings for Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences. Written by Indiana University professor Susan Herring and doctoral candidate Courtenay Honeycutt, it describes some research questions about Twitter being used for conversation and collaboration. To quote from their discussion, “This study investigated the conversationality of Twitter, with special attention to the role played by the @ sign.”

Specifically they studied the public timeline and the use of the @ symbol that Twitter users actually invented to talk to each other as described in this New York Times article, Twitter Serves Up Ideas from its Followers. The researchers also had to filter out the other uses of the symbol, some of which are entertaining. The emoticon @_@ is one googly-eyed guy that they didn’t intend for this study. The offhand reference to someone else using the @ symbol was also filtered out, along with email addresses, and location references such as “I’m @ the coffeeshop right now.” They wanted to study one Twitter user addressing another for specific reasons.

They found that the @ sign use has doubled in two year’s time, and that Japanese and Spanish speakers use it as often as English speakers.

How is the user-invented @ convention changing conversation-based content?

They also found, and this was interesting to me, that the use of the @ symbol may actually be expanding the types of content that are being used in microblogging.

We further found that tweets with @ exhibited a
wider range of content, in comparison to tweets without
@, and that most tweets without @ just answered
the Twitter site’s question: What are you doing? This
suggests that @, in addition to directly enabling a more
interactive use of Twitter, is indirectly contributing to
expanding the types of content expressed in tweets.

In the footnotes they further note the use of the @ symbol to address others is happening in Flickr, the photo sharing site, and I would add that it’s also used often in blog comments when responding to a specific person. It’s spreading as a standard, practically! Updated to add: right after publishing this post, I hopped over to Google Wave, and in a non-profit wave I joined, they had already implemented an automatic link to a person’s Twitter account if you addressed them starting with the @ symbol. Woah.

Learning more about conversation analysis

Last month I spoke with Tanya Rabourn, who is studying information science at the University of Texas who helped me begin to understand conversation analysis. She said that studying Twitter is “sexy” right now, but also pointed out that research in conversation analysis originated with studying suicide hotlines for conversation patterns. Yow. Conversations on IRC are also studied frequently – text based conversations are easily enumerated and analyzed, I suppose. There’s even a tool available for download from Indiana University called VisualDTA that helps with Dynamic Topic Analysis (DTA) by providing a way to visualize the structure of the topic flow within a conversation. (See pages 7 and 8 of the Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter PDF for examples of VisualDTA diagrams.) I also learned a lot by reading a blog entry that describes written discourse at Studying online conversation in the Twitter generation that Tanya had tagged on a social bookmarking site. I learned that Conversation Analysis studies the “norms and conventions that speakers use in interaction to establish communicative understandings.”

Customer support and Twitter

Naturally, seeing how I’ve written a book with Conversation in the title, I want to relate what I’m reading to what I’ve already written. (Or is that unnatural?) So, where are the customer support conversation analyses? Has anyone studied the back-and-forth written discourse that occurs in 140-characters to see what some best practices are for engagement and troubleshooting to help someone with Twitter? Or is Twitter simply a method to get to the front of the support queue by saying “Pay attention to me because I have a smart mobile device so I must have a bit more money than your average slob of a customer!”

I believe that phone conversations for customer support have been studied quite a bit – looking for phrases that sound like triggers for anger, avoiding long pauses, and when one party overtakes a phone conversation, it’s relatively easy to detect when that’s happening. But with Twitter, you could have long pauses intentionally as asynchronous, IM-like conversations happen when someone gets up from their desk and returns after a business meeting, for example. Neither party is angry about that long pause, it’s just an understood agreement in the Twitter medium that you may or may not be immediately responsive. How does that time factor change the “agreement” for a support exchange? Is Twitter reserved for the narcissistic whiners? Or are true relationships happening and caring, meaningful attention being paid to customers on Twitter?

Wait, don’t answer these questions. I want some data and dynamic topic analysis to back up your theory.

Wiki adoption

Stewart Mader is a wiki consultant, probably the most experienced, practical, and sensible wiki adoption expert available today. His message about wiki adoption resonated with me as I look for collaborative authoring solutions for our Agile teams. He said, if you look around the enterprise, people have high adoption of email for their daily business tasks. In the adoption phase for a wiki or collaboration system, you can tie a wiki to email conceptually as this ubiquitous useful way to get work done. If you think about it, more complex systems have a higher learning curve, so people default back to email to get into their comfort zone. But, sending email messages is an isolating experience – email doesn’t let you work together collectively like a wiki does.

For example, working in the shared space of a wiki is like using light rail to get to work. He has made friends on the train he took each day years ago and he’s still friends with them today. In other words, being in an environment that enables social interaction is more powerful. He says to think about the business process a wiki affects – do not just apply what the Internet says to do with a wiki. The biggest and most powerful collaboration going on with wikis in the enterprise is group collaboration – small groups. You don’t want one-off contributions once, you want repeated collaboration and repeated use, as frequent as email and as a simple core tool that they use for everyday business. Preach it, brother!

He also talked about measurements to indicate that adoption is successful. One of the biggest dangers he sees is counting the number of pages created when adopting a wiki. Don’t do it! Better metrics are measure per time period or per some other unit:

Views                    Day

Revisions      per       Page

Comments                 Unit

Tags                     Type

Automation – 1001 Nightly Builds

Some of WebWorks’ customers gave talks and a panel discussion about automating software builds using WebWorks Automap. These were great eye-openers and my ears perked up because they were writers working in Agile environments. They have to release in tandem with internal development cycles, so they automated as much as they could. One doc group used to have a 15 page document on how to create a PDF complete with screenshots for all the settings. Mary Anthony from Palantir said their writers have to document 4 user interfaces, 3 admin GUIs, more than 12 servers and an API, and they used advanced techniques such as text insets in FrameMaker. Using WebWorks, another writing group had automated PDF generation, wiki output, plus HTML output, all from Framemaker source files.

This was interesting to me – they found there was a true documentation domain and it was hard for someone who usually builds software for them to put together docs. Terms like cross references, text inserts, and so on, were foreign to their build engineers. They don’t even have the concept of “book” as a collection of chapters with a TOC in Framemaker. Even using a Windows server to automate builds was outside of the build engineer’s knowledge.

I learned about a tool called Apache Ivy, which is an agile dependency manager. Using this manager helped them integrate their documentation builds with the product builds. Mary Anthony explained that Ivy waits for the outcome of another build – like a refrigerator holding chocolate pudding, Ivy opens the fridge door and gives the build process what it wants (the chocolate pudding, or the fine documentation).

Overall a great couple of presentations about automation from which I learned a lot.

Blogging and Web 2.0

Tom Johnson is a blogger and technical writer and likely the most subscribed-to blogger in our particular tech comm niche. He gave a great talk based on his blog series, Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging. In case you’re curious, the sins are being Fake, Irrelevant, Boring, Unreadable, Irresponsible, Unfindable, Inattentive. (I’ll link to the rest once he has the blog posts finished.)

He had great pictures representing each sin. My favorite quotes were from Penelope Trunk (The Brazen Careerist, Blogs without topics are a waste of time) and Stephen Fry’s blog entry, “Don’t Quote Me“.

This session was a great starting point for our next panel about Web 2.0, although we mostly talked about blogging. The Technorati State of the Blogsphere 2009 report came out yesterday, so it was useful to talk about some of the findings from it (73% of bloggers use Twitter as compared to 14% of the general population, for one.) I enjoyed talking with Alan Porter and Tom on this panel and I may have asked as many questions as I answered. All in all, a great two days of discussion and presentations.

For me, there were a few waves in my inbox from the start. First, Doctor Wave, impersonating a Bill Nye the Science Guy character appears in the “Welcome to Google Wave” wave as an embedded YouTube video, and points to different areas on the screen while embedded in a Wave. It’s a nice welcome and a great navigation aid to the user interface, very clever in that the perspective is as if he’s talking to you from the inside of the interface. I liked it despite my normal reluctance to take two minutes and twelve seconds to watch a video about something I need to understand better. The video won’t be nearly as effective outside of the Wave, but you could still learn from it if you view it in YouTube instead of in the Wave.

From embedded video to try-and-see to blog entries

Next I started clicking around, and was naturally drawn to my Contacts to see who else is on this invitation-only site? The ones pulled from my Gmail contacts were nearly all from OLPC, since that account is my main email account for that project.

After that, nearly all of my learning process came from Mashable’s blog entry titled Google Wave Guide, and videos about using Google Wave. I also studied their entry titled “Testing Google Wave: This Thing is Tidal” before getting my invite. One of the best “getting started” guides is also by Mashable. Wow, how did Google get third-parties to write their Getting Started Guide? In reality, the Mashable blog entry also serves as a map to the Google help itself, by pointing to the list of Advanced Search terms for Google Wave, for example.

Only after logging on for another two or three times did I find a Google Wave FAQ, written as a wave. I think this FAQ is a great example of documentation when you need it, simplified and task-oriented.

Mostly I am learning by exploring. Last night, Char James-Tanny set up a public Google Wave for STC, the Society for Technical Communication, called STCWave. I found it by searching for “with:public STCWave”. By using that Wave I was able to add more technical communicators to my contacts list, especially those that I didn’t have a Gmail address for previously.

Agile team collaboration tool

I have to wonder aloud if Google built Wave as an essential part of their development teams’ collaboration arsenal. Real-time collaboration is so important to being successful at Agile. Having searchable archives of team decisions and team discussion can be extremely helpful, and photo and document sharing can help a team “gel” so well. We’ve been using Etherpad and Campfire for text-based discussions and some file sharing as well as shared document editing.

Search integration

I have also found it essential to know some basic search phrases to help you find Waves that will be useful to you. One is “with:public” (no space after the colon). With that search delimiter you can find all Waves with public users invited, and other user names and group names can be substituted for public. You can search based on participants, creators, the state of the wave (such as read, filed, and muted), and the types of attachments in the Wave.

Being a student of the Wave

So what are the best ways to learn Google Wave? I think that conversational and community teachings are the way of the Wave. Text is still a huge part of learning, yet printed artifacts are not (yet) a part of learning Google Wave. Video and screencasts are proving to be made by many people.

And finally, learning by experimentation is how many of us will learn Google Wave, especially since its access is to a limited release and invite- or nomination-only web application.

RJ Jacquez, Adobe product evangelist, tweeted a link to an article about Content Curation on the site Social Media Today titled “Manifesto for the Content Curator,” written By Rohit Bhargrava. In it, he describes his definition of a content curator: “A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online.”

Photo courtesy ingorr on flickr

I think that professional writers and technical writers should consider a move towards this role. We already search for and find the best content, sift through loads of content, discard poor content, and publish the most worthy content whenever a software release goes out. This description also sounds like something a content strategist would do as part of their analysis of the content.

What I found fascinating after the article had been out a few days was to read one of the comments, where the commentor seemed to think that tasks related to content curation should be automated. He referenced two sites that curate content by classifying it and rating it, mahalo.com and oneforty.com. He saw content curation as a great opportunity for software developers and entrepreneurs.

What do you think? I’m guessing my blog’s audience would protest mightily. Do you believe that content curation can be done by algorithms of rating and relevancy? Or should this job be reserved for specialists?

Laura: Could you elaborate more on the legal and copyright issues of open source content, and collaborative content, beyond asking for permission?

Anne: First, a few definitions. Copyright was intended to protect the creator from publishers publishing the content, “to the Ruin of them and their Families.” That ruination quote is  pulled from the Statute of Anne, considered the origin of all copyright. Copyright was a concept written into the US constitution. Mark Twain thought it was a good idea to extend his copyright privileges in 1906.

Copyright law’s international standardization started in 1886. Copyright law gives the original creator exclusive rights to do with the content as they please. A writer might give someone one-time printing rights for an article or essay. A photographer might display a photo on Flickr but mark it with a certain license that indicates how you can use it.

Licensing the content is one of the things the copyright holder can do with the content to indicate how they, the creator, give permission for it to be used, sold, distributed, and so forth.

The phrase “open source content” isn’t precisely defined. The term open source typically describes software, but more and more people are using the term “open source” to talk about content that can be re-used as long as licensing requirements are met. Collaborative content could be created by a small set of trusted collaborators, and there are different production and sharing models you can follow for collaborative content such as wikis. My book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, goes into some ideas.

Laura: What issues and legalities do we as Technical Communicators or Wiki Administrators need to be aware of as we move towards collaborative authoring projects and so forth, especially when documenting open source software?

Anne: Projects that are open source give away the code artifacts to create the software. Open source software, as defined on Wikipedia, has many criteria it must meet in its licensing agreements.

Documentation specifically may lean towards an openess, but restrictions on use, requirements for attributions, and what happens with changes (or branches) from an original document source may vary widely. Legally, documentation writers should understand the license under which the content can be used, and follow the licensing instructions.

Creative Commons has four licenses that are explained in straightforward language on their website. The most accommodating requires only attribution. Then there are more restrictive mixes and matches that enable different commercial uses,  whether you must share any derivatives, whether you can make a derivative, and so on.

Licensing of content is something that we’ve talked about recently on the FLOSS Manuals discuss email list. Adam Hyde, the founder of FLOSS Manuals, also wrote an essay about free documentation and he is passionate in his thinking that even requiring attribution limits the “freedom” of content to go anywhere and be used by anyone. Collaborative content often requires that attribution of all collaborators be displayed somewhere.

Laura: How about content that is done collaboratively? How does that content get vetted, in terms of technical accuracy to avoid any legal liabilities?

Anne: I believe we create collaborative content quite often in a corporate environment, and your review process is how the content gets vetted. In larger collaborative environments, such as the ones that large wikis can scale to, there are more reviewers of the content. I believe the content is vetted if the company backs it up based on the language in the software contracts that happen at the sale of the software. In open source projects, the “contract” you enter with a provider may or may not exist. It may be “use at your own risk” or it may be “we are service providers for this open source software and here’s what you can expect from us.” The same general principles can be upheld for guaranteeing the accuracy of documentation. The legal liability lands in the contract that a person enters with the vendor of the software, I believe. Since I’m not a lawyer, I can’t guarantee avoidance of legal liabilities, though.

One model to follow is to offer two sets of collaborative content. One set of collaborative content has a disclaimer stating that the company or organization does not guarantee the accuracy of the content, such as “Content in this collection has not been verified by our company. Use all of the information here at your own risk.” Another set of collaborative content where the collaborators are only your company’s information developers, and their job is to provide content that is as accurate as possible. That collection of content would not need a disclaimer and could be displayed like an online help site. Lisa Dyer has an article on the WritersUA website that describes this model for company-generated content and community-generated content.

To learn more, you may want to watch these free training courses from this blog entry.

1. Online Media Law: The Basics for Bloggers and Other Online Publishers: With this course, you’ll learn about copyright, privacy, defamation, and more for online publishing. [News University]
2. Introduction to Copyright Law: Check out this course to get a lowdown on the basics of copyright law, specifically online. [MIT]
3. A Fair(y) Use Tale: Here you’ll learn about fair use and copyright. [Novell]

Updated to add: Technical Communication student and Austinite Emmelyn Wang just recommended the book, A Legal Primer for for the Digital Age, which is in the Allyn and Bacon Technical Communication Series. Thanks Emmelyn!