Random thoughts about publishing

Site Feed

Labels

Palimpsest has moved. Please visit our blog in its new location for the most recent posts from Scriptorium.

Palimpsest

 

Back from Atlanta, STC wrapup

Thursday, May 07, 2009 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe

The STC Summit was fun as always. My slides are below, but first some other observations.

David Pogue was an excellent keynote speaker. And he sang!


Attendance was lower than last year, but traffic at our booth (and others from what I heard) was up. I think this was a combination of a better location for exhibitors, shorter exhibit hours (Wednesday was cut), and perhaps more senior and more serious attendees.

The biggest change from previous years had to be the use of social media in general, but especially Twitter:

• The #stc09 hashtag got a serious workout, the tweetup drew 50 or 60 people, and there was constant chatter about the conference online.
  
• There was a complementary online event, #stcnotthere.
  
• As we were leaving the conference in sketchy weather, #stuckinATL_stc09, created by @lisajoydyer, helped us chronicle the various airport delays and find each other at the airport. It made the delays almost bearable.
• Rachel Hougton's flickr feed captures the feel of the entire event, ranging from the Georgia Aquarium and the World of Coca-Cola to the honors banquet and lots of casual photos. (great job, Rachel, btw)
  
• You can find a collaborative liveblog on scribblelive.
  

Interestingly, it seems as though fewer people blogged the event; instead, they were tweeting. However, Keith Soltys did put up day-by-day summaries on Core Dump, and Gryphon Mountain Journals has some reactions. I was unable to find any other live-blogging; if I missed you, please leave a comment.

Tom Johnson interviewed numerous people (including me) at the event. His interview with Ginny Redish is already available.

The tweeting and other social media augmented the actual event. There were people tweeting for lots of reasons: to solve problems (chairs needed), organize groups for dinner, provide sound bites from presentations, and more. The organizing committee put up a twitter feed on a monitor next to their booth and got lots of attention.

I get the impression that the tweets gave non-attendees a flavor of the event. If you were following #stc09 but not attending, did this make you more likely to consider attending in 2010?

Ironically, one of my presentations was actually about technical communication and Web 2.0 issues. I have a white paper on this topic, which is far more useful than the slides. (OK, if you insist, the slides are also available.)

My second presentation was presumptuously entitled "The State of Structure." This presentation discusses the results of our industry survey on structured authoring, which was conducted in January and February 2009.

If you want more information, the survey report is $200 and available in our store.

Labels: conferences, stc09, structured authoring, survey

5:02 PM Permalink | |

 

Life in the desert

Monday, March 23, 2009 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe

Last week, I attended the annual DocTrain West event, which was held this year in Palm Springs, California.

Weather in Palm Springs was spectacular as always with highs in the 80s during the day. Some of my more northerly friends seemed a bit shell-shocked by the sudden change from snow and slush to sun and sand. (North Carolina was 40 degrees when I left, so that was a nice change for me as well.)

Scott Abel did his usual fine job of organizing and somehow being omnipresent.

I promised to post my session slides. The closing keynote was mostly images and is probably not that useful without audio, so I'm going to point you to an article that covers similar ground (What do Movable Type and XML Have in Common, PDF link).

I have embedded the slides from my DITA to PDF session below.

I have also posted the InDesign template file and the XSL we built to preprocess the DITA XML into something that InDesign likes on our wiki. Note that running the XSL requires a working configuration of the DITA Open Toolkit. For more information, refer to the DITA to InDesign page on our wiki.

Labels: conferences, dita, doctrain, InDesign

2:51 PM Permalink | |

 

Upcoming DITA events (free, cheap, and discounted)

Wednesday, February 04, 2009 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe

Free

Tomorrow (February 5) at noon Eastern time, I'm doing a webinar, DITA 101--Why the Buzz?

This is a basic introduction to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, an XML standard for technical communication content. If you're wondering about this DITA "thing," and want to get some basic information, this is the session for you.

Also, the price is right, as it's free (register here). Audio will be Internet-based, so you don't even have the expense of a phone call.

Many thanks to MadCap Software, who is organizing and sponsoring this series of free webinars. These sessions are "tool-independent" -- they are not going to be pitches for MadCap products.

Cheap

I have to mention Simon Bate's new Hacking the DITA OT white paper again. It's crammed with useful tips and tricks on how to get started configuring DITA output to your satisfaction. It's not free, but at $20 for an instant download, it's pretty cheap.

Discounted

Conferences are more expensive than our $20 white paper, but they also give you the opportunity to talk with people face-to-face. My next conference event is DocTrain West (Palm Springs, CA). I have two sessions:

• What Gutenberg Can Teach Us about XML: This session looks at movable type and explores how the changes introduced by the printing press compare to the changes introduced by XML.
  
• Demystifying DITA to PDF Publishing: This session discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each approach to extracting PDF from DITA content. Includes discussion of the DITA Open Toolkit, FrameMaker, and InDesign.
  

You can register for the event at a $400 savings until February 17. I hope to see you there.

Labels: conferences, dita

2:26 PM Permalink | |

 

2009 conference plans

Friday, December 19, 2008 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe

The conference lineup for 2009 is looking good. Thus far, we have tentative plans to attend, present, and/or exhibit at the following events:

• DocTrain West,March 17-20 (Palm Springs)
  
• STC, May 3-6 (Atlanta)
• IEEE PCS, July 19-22 (Honolulu)
  
• DocTrain DITA, June 3-5 (Indianapolis)
  
• LavaCon, September/October (New Orleans)
  

I also have a DITA 101 webinar coming up with MadCap on February 5. It's free, and you can register here.

Drop me a note in the comments. Are you planning to attend any conferences in 2009, or is the economy putting a crimp in your travel plans?

We are also considering additional webinars this year. What are you thoughts on webinars versus conferences?

Labels: conferences

12:41 PM Permalink | |

 

Report from Internet Summit 2008

Thursday, November 20, 2008 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe

On Wednesday, November 19, I attended a new event in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the Internet Summit 2008. The organizers got over 600 attendees and sold the event out.

The good
Having an event like this 10 minutes from my house was disconcerting. Usually, conferences require travel, and the realization that after a day of conference stuff, I'd be sleeping in my own bed was odd. But excellent.

Bob Young of lulu.com (and the founder of Red Hat). He gave a brief presentation with some salient points about the Internet. He pointed out that Google (and Google AdWords) represents a serious branding problem. Are your customers just typing in "xyz widget" and then clicking the first or second search result or do they go directly to xyzwidgetcompany.com? If the former, then Google effectively owns your customer, and if your search position drops, you are toast.

Gian Fulgoni of ComScore with some terrifying insights about customer behavior. In particular, click rates are down to under 0.1% and 6% of customers account for 50% of clicks. Those "clickers" have relatively low incomes, which makes them not-so-appealing from a marketing point of view.

Fulgoni also discussed the fact that advertisers are paying mainly by the click, even though his data shows that simply viewing an ad leads to increased brand awareness ("lift"). In other words, ads are producing results even without clicks, and the ad host should get paid for that. (Speaking as an advertiser who takes full advantage of the "we only pay for clicks and there aren't very many of them" phenomenon, I tend to disagree.)

The award for Most Unassuming Title goes to "Best Practices for the Modern Infrastructure." The panel was fantastic, and the moderator (David Jones of Southern Capitol Ventures) did a great job of seeding the discussion with good questions. This was an example of how to do a panel right. The panel included some data center guys (Greg Rollet of Peak 10 and Paul Penny of Consonus Technology); Thomas Jacobik, Google Operations Manager in Lenoir, NC; and Michael Cristinziano of Citrix. Highlights included Rollet's characterization of a new data center as a "cash-incinerating machine," the point that data center operators' biggest cost is labor with power/energy not too far behind, and a reminder that "cloud computing" means that somebody else owns the "competency of infrastructure." Regarding the economic situation, the data center guys actually expect the result to be scarcity of data center resources because building out new data centers requires a lot of cash (see first point.)

The overarching theme that emerged from the conference was control, or rather the lack thereof. Blogging and other social media take away control from corporations. Cloud computing takes away control of infrastructure.

The last panel I attended was moderated by Scot Wingo of ChannelAdvisor. He pulled together a really excellent group to discuss search issues. Jordan Glogau of 1-800-Flowers.com discussed search from a corporate point of view, including issues like the conflicts that can arise when corporation and franchisees are interested in the same keywords. Kevin McFall talked about rushmoredrive.com and how they optimize their search engine, which "serves the online needs of this country's Black community." Mitesh Patel has a couple of golf-related sites; he made an interesting point about differentiating between "browsers" and "buyers" based on their keywords and serving up different ads. (For example, a person searching on "used golf clubs" is probably browsing, a person searching on a specific model name is likely ready to buy.) Michael Marshall of PointMetrix offered some fascinating insights into how Google really works. For example, Google has identified the center of each town, and when you search locally, a company's results on their proximity to the center that Google has identified.

I ran into a bunch of people I knew and connected with lots of new ones. It was great fun!

There's more on the conference in the #is08 tweme from me and others.

The bad
Panels, panels, and more panels. The presentations would have been stronger if they had just picked one person to do the presentation instead of trying to cram 5 people's thoughts into 45 minutes.

Audience issues. Many of the sessions were too basic for the audience. You can see some of this feedback in the backchannel twitter stream.

Wi-Fi. There was free wi-fi (yay!), but accessing it required agreeing to UNC's terms of service (ok) repeatedly (BOOO!).

No content takeaways. The (rather attractive) conference booklet had speaker biographies, a schedule, and a list of sponsors, but no details about the various panels other than the time, location, and title.

Breaks were too short. There was some major networking in the hallways, and it seemed as though the organizers were constantly having to round people up to send them back into the presentations. Longer breaks would be a plus.

The ugly
The phenomenon of five male panelists sneering at mommy bloggers immediately after mentioning the power of specific communities in the blogosphere.

The demographics of the panelists did not reflect the attendees. Specifically, there were 64 speakers, of which three were women. How could this happen, I asked? Nathan Gilliatt replied:

They looked in the yellow pages under Suspects, Usual. #is08

Depressing venture capitalists talking about "nuclear winter." They looked as though they were about to fall asleep in their comfy armchairs (note to presenters: give them stools or something to keep them awake), and they had zero energy. Credit is a mess. We get it. Talk about something useful. Like, "What type of business could get funded in the current economy?" "What's been your biggest mistake as a VC?" etc.

Labels: conferences, is08

5:00 PM Permalink | |

 

Presentations on features squeezed into FrameMaker 8

— posted by Terry Smith

Just two weeks ago I was in an elementary school gymnasium working as an election official. Fourteen straight hours with no breaks for meals because officials aren't allowed to leave the polling area (which is why your ballot may have crumbs on it, sorry about that). In my precinct one candidate received only one vote more than the opponent; in another race, the difference was six votes. A very long and exciting day.

Bleary-eyed but pleased to have served my precinct, I spent the next two days attending the DITA/TechComm conference. Perhaps not the heady stuff of this year's election, but definitely worthwhile. This conference had two themes: DITA and the tools in the Adobe Technical Communication Suite (although Madcap Flare was definitely represented, too). The place where those two topics meet is FrameMaker.

I was scheduled to speak on two FrameMaker topics for the conference. FrameMaker 8 now has built-in DITA authoring capabilities, which I demonstrated. I had a few slides to keep the demonstration on track. The slides, which I have included here, are brief.



My recommendation? If you want to get the most from FrameMaker's conditional text capabilities, use structured FrameMaker and install the free ABCM product instead of using FrameMaker 8's Filter By Attribute feature.

Labels: adobe, conferences, dita, FrameMaker, PDF, presentations, xmetal

11:49 AM Permalink | |

 

Food for thought on document maintenance

Friday, November 14, 2008 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe

[Updated to add link that I rudely left out.]

In a report from tekom (link in German), we hear about a session on translation reuse strategies.

The presenters point out one underappreciated risk of translation management -- language evolution. They note that as languages evolve, information stored in translation memory could become out-of-date. In particular, they noted that Polish has changed significantly in the past few years. (translation and paraphrase mine)

And today, there's an interesting article at Gryphon Mountain Journals. Ben Minson points out the conflict between writing content that is easy to maintain and content that is most helpful to the reader:

Generic: “To turn on the machine, press the Power button.”

Specific: “To turn on the machine, press the Power button, which is located on the top of the device.” (…plus an image of the button, plus an image pointing out where on the machine it appears.)

Which one is easier to maintain? Which one is more helpful?

I’ll ask a different way. Which one is better for the writer, and which one is better for the audience?

We need to learn to strike a balance between efficiency and usability. That said, most of the authoring environments I see have a long way to go before they reach "overly efficient" and need to swing back toward usability.

Labels: conferences, localization, technical writing

8:30 AM Permalink | |

 

tekom report

Wednesday, November 12, 2008 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe

I hope that the cognitive impairment resulting from jet lag has dissipated enough to write this post.

Last week, I attended tekom/tcworld. With approximately 2200 attendees, plus 1200 trade show-only visitors, this is the largest gathering of technical communicators in the world. Over 180 vendors were at the trade show, along with some fairly impressive accessories.



I am sorry to tell you that the chocolate fountain people showed up with a juice bar this year.

Wednesday morning started off on a fun note, as several people stopped by to congratulate us on the election. The European population is at least as interested in this year's U.S. election as we were. (Side note: During an extended beer-and-sausage dinner at the Ratskeller, a group of us were sitting behind a group of German bikers. They were in full biker regalia, with patches for something like "Rolling Thunder Wiesbaden." Lots of beards, beards with braids, long hair, and leather. In fact, other than the German language, they would have fit right in at Myrtle Beach during Bike Week. So, at one point, their table got loud(er), and we looked over to see them crashing their beer mugs together yelling, "OBAMA! OBAMA!")

We had an opportunity to catch up with conference buddies and fellow consultants. Tony Self's description of Australia's fierce killer magpies was especially entertaining. I'm afraid I didn't quite believe the story at first, but wikipedia says it's true. (Bike helmets with fake eyes on the back to fool the magpies into attacking the back of your head instead of pecking out your real eyes!)

On a work-related note, I delivered two sessions, one on XSL and one on Web 2.0. If you're interested in a (very) basic introduction to XSL, the content of the XSL workshop is now available. You'll need the instructions (PDF, 1.1MB), the XML sample file, and the CSS file for formatting. The workshop is based on information from our three-day XSL class, which is obviously far more detailed.

The Web 2.0 presentation, in Flash format, is available below:


Notes: Use the arrow keys to navigate through the slides. The first slide may take a few seconds to come up; the presentation file is quite large. If you prefer a narrative white paper version, we have one here.

A few final thoughts about the conference:

• Internet connectivity ranged from prohibitively costly to insanely expensive. I got three calls from AT&T while in Germany to tell me that I had exceeded my data plan allowance and needed to upgrade to prevent the ominous "overage fees." I appreciate the customer service, but I'd appreciate an inexpensive international data plan more. Perhaps related to this, there was little blogging and less twittering coming out of this conference. People seemed less connected to their cell phones and laptops. This might be a good thing.
• My favorite example of internationalized documentation is here (not for the very easily offended). I took this picture in Bingen, a lovely town on the Rhine about half an hour from Wiesbaden. If you're interested in other pictures, you can see mine here (they were taken on a cell phone camera, so apologies in advance for the quality issues).
  

Labels: conferences, tekom, travel, xsl

12:47 PM Permalink | |

 

Coming attractions

Wednesday, October 22, 2008 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe

DocTrain East kicks off next Wednesday, October 29. Scriptorium will be well-represented; Simon Bate is delivering a day-long workshop, Authoring and Publishing with XMetaL and DITA. If you have signed up for this workshop, expect details on the software you need in the next 24 hours or so. If you don't hear from Simon, please contact DocTrain to make sure that you are registered for the event.

Thursday morning (October 30), Simon will deliver a session comparing DITA support in XMetaL and FrameMaker. Meanwhile, Matt Arnold will be camped out in the trade show area. We're bringing tons of goodies, including the usual chocolate, so be sure to stop by and say hello. We're also doing several giveaways. (Yes, we will bribe you to visit us. Those trade shows can get really tedious...)

The following week, Matt and I will be attending tekom/tcworld in Wiesbaden, Germany. At this conference, I'll be doing a workshop on XSL and a presentation on Web 2.0 and technical communication. Both are on Thursday. Instead of bringing coals to Newcastle (and taking up precious space in our limited baggage), we'll be picking up chocolate for our booth at a local (and excellent) shop. I visited Kunder last year and, as usual, spent way too much. (Fair warning, they don't take U.S. credit cards, so bring euros. Lots of euros.)

Again, please stop by the booth and visit if you're at the conference.

tekom ends on Friday (November 7), but we're staying until Sunday morning to take advantage of cheaper airfare. Saturday, I'm planning a field trip to Bingen am Rhein, which has connections to the medieval Hildegard von Bingen. We can reach Bingen by train in about an hour. If you're interested in going, leave me a comment or send email and I'll attempt to coordinate.

Labels: conferences, doctraineast08, tekom, travel

12:21 PM Permalink | |

 

Vade mecum tekom

Friday, September 12, 2008 — posted by Ethan Duty

This year's tcworld conference and tekom-Trade Fair is November 5–7 at its usual location in Wiesbaden, Germany. Sarah O'Keefe has two presentations scheduled*, and Matt Arnold will be camped out at the Scriptorium trade show booth as usual.

If you have never attended tekom/tcworld, we highly recommend it. The conference is the largest gathering of technical communicators in the world. (Yes, it's bigger than STC.) Wiesbaden is a lovely town and was an R&R facility for soldiers (Roman soldiers) who came to soak in the hot springs. In addition to the historical interest, tekom and Scriptorium have a special offer for first-time attendees from non–German-speaking country. Use this registration form and get 20% off your registration.


* The sessions are both on Thursday: Introduction to XSL workshop (11:15 a.m. to 1 p.m.) and The Implications of Web 2.0 for Technical Communicators (3 p.m. to 3:45 p.m.)

Labels: conferences, tekom, travel

10:48 AM Permalink | |

 

Web 2.0 and Truth

Thursday, June 26, 2008 — posted by Sarah

My presentation at X-Pubs was about the impact of Web 2.0 or user-generated content on technical communication. (You can view the presentation at the bottom of this post.)

A phrase I heard repeatedly in reference to professional content was "a single version of the truth," which alludes to the idea that you should only have one instance of any given piece of content.

And that got me thinking. There are many areas of tech comm where this idea makes sense.

User-generated content, though, is in direct conflict with a single, unchanging, objective truth. Wikis, by definition, have content that is constantly evolving.

Furthermore, there's truth and then there's, well, truth. Compare and contrast these two snippets:

"The ABC feature is unusable. Use the XYZ as a work-around."

"You can use ABC to do blah blah. Here's how:
(many annoying steps)"

Which one is truth? Both? More importantly, which one is more useful to the reader?

It takes a brave or maybe foolish corporate technical writer to criticize their own product explicitly. (This, in turn, is probably why third-party computer trade books sell so well. Somehow, I don't see a title like Word Annoyances getting the Microsoft seal of approval.)

But even though technical writers try to act as user advocates, there's a built-in conflict of interest -- technical writers are paid by corporations, not by users.

User-generated content meets a need that corporate technical publications do not (or perhaps cannot). It provides unfiltered, opinionated, and user-biased coverage of technical topics.

Why is there a gap between professionally created technical publications and the end users?

1. Updates can take a long time to get into the official documentation because of lengthy review, approval, and publishing processes.

2. Annotation capabilities are rarely provided to users. If they are, they're usually fairly limited.

3. The documentation is not sufficiently candid.

What are the implications for technical writers?

1. Document publishing needs to accelerate.
2. Online documents should allow for comments and discussion.
3. The documentation needs to be explicit about product limitations and workarounds.

In effect, technical writers need to have more of an editorial voice.

Here is my Web 2.0 presentation:



Notes: Use the arrow keys to navigate through the slides. The first slide may take a few seconds to come up; the presentation file is quite large.

Labels: analysis, conferences, web 2.0, xpubs

11:21 AM Permalink | |

 

English lessons

Wednesday, June 25, 2008 — posted by Sarah

I'm at London's Heathrow airport, getting ready to return home. Many thanks to the organizers of the STC UK and X-Pubs events for wonderful hospitality (special thanks to Ant Davey who picked me up at the airport when I arrived at 6:30 in the morning).

Some observations about my week in the UK:

• During conference sessions, you can expect that participants will not ask any questions until the end of the session.
• Questions are often quite pointed, far more so than in the U.S. I've noticed this on the BBC news as well. The question is phrased politely, but the general paraphrase is something like, "Well, that's all very nice, but isn't it true that blah completely undermines what you are saying?" For instance, you might get a question like, "You're really pushing for XML here, but isn't it true that XML isn't actually applicable for many situations?" Um. (Incidentally, participants in Germany frequently challenge the presenter as well. Not that there's anything wrong with that...)
• There is no such thing as a "British" accent. I heard an unbelievably variety of different accents and inflections, including Irish, Northern Irish, Scottish, northern England, southern England. The natives here can place accents with remarkable accuracy. And let's not forget variations from the non-native speakers, such as Germans and eastern European. It's quite fascinating, and for me, at least, some accents are much harder to understand than others. In particular, I found that long sentences were much easier to understand than a quick question. As a result, I was constantly asking service personnel to repeat themselves (they tend to ask short questions like, "checking in?").
• The X-Pubs attendees were mostly men, not too surprising with the emphasis on the defense (defence) industry and aerospace. But quite a different demographic from STC.
  
• There's been recent discussion about the relative lack of blogging or twittering at STC, but at these events, there was none (except for me). With wireless access clocking in at around $30 per day, it's not that surprising.
• The current exchange rate is really, really, really painful.

I had some very interesting discussions with participants at both events, ate a lot of great food, and had a generally wonderful time.

Labels: conferences, presentations, stc2008, xpubs

4:26 AM Permalink | |

 

Building communities one IP address at a time

Tuesday, June 24, 2008 — posted by Simon Bate

Day 2 at Gilbane: Continuing in the Social Computing track

Case studies in collaborative computing

• Frank D'Angese - EarthKnowledge.net
  
• Mark Yolton - SAP Communities
  
• Kym Harrington - Sales Edge
  

Social communities in Web 2.0:

• Work best when they are orchestrated, rather than moderated.
• Rating and ranking of contributers increases quality of the contributions.
• SAP encourages quality by having users award 3, 6, or sometimes 12 points to contributers. When they reach 250 points, they're considered "top contributors" or "highly-active contributors."
• The super-top contributors (1/100th of 1% of the best in points, professionalism, and maturity in collaboration) are identified as SAP Mentors.
• Management can be concerned in adopting web 2.0 because of exposing weaknesses to competitors, general risk, and disruptive technologies.
• SAP sponsors occasional get-togethers so that contributers can meet each other.

Some risks of sponsoring a user community:

• Self-promoters and anti-social behavior. Both of these are often handled by the community. "Public humiliation is more effective than policing." sez SAP.
• If your company participates, beware of inauthentic interaction.
• Sometimes users will vent about the product or company.
• A "dead" community (no one goes there) will project a bad image.

Heard in several places. Support calls can be grouped into two classes: How-to questions and true bugs. The point of a user community is to reduce (or entirely offload) support time spent on how-to questions.

User communities follow the "1-9-90" rule. That is 1% of the community are highly active participants, 9% are occasional contributers, and 90% are consumers of the information. SAP focuses on the 9% and encourages them to move into the top 1%.

English tends to be the "lingua franca" of user communities. Multilingual sites present a challenge, because they can be difficult to moderate.

While some communities offer live chat, it doesn't have the value of public forums, because the information in a forum is captured permanently. Live chat is not as public and much harder to track and follow.

Social Media at Tipping Point

• Geoffrey Bock - Gilbane Group
• Rachel Happe - IDC

Dell seeks out conversations about Dell and participates in them. This has a major positive impact on brand sentiment.

HP Wetpaint -- Advice was so good, people in printing got annoyed.
Worth visiting.

Use of LinkedIn varies by industry. The overall average is 14%. For low-tech companies, use is as low as 2%; high-tech it's closer to 40%.
24% of all employees use some form of social networking.
Only 2% microblog (but I think that reflects much more on the novelty of the concept, rather than an acceptance level).

Gulp. 19% of the US workforce will retire in the next 5 years (this data is a couple of years old). There's a lot of knowledge that will leave along with the people. How do we capture all the knowledge? The preceding figures show that not everyone will use social computing or communities to record what they do. One approach is to establish (and record) conversations with these people.

On the other hand, 41% of 18-35 year-olds use social media and expect it at work. Social media gives them more access to tools, people, etc. It's NOT for just fun, they know it works faster.

Total content of the internet:
161 Exabytes (Millions of Terabytes) in 2006
900+ Exabytes by 2010
It's expected that at that time 80% will be user-created.

Technology for Ad Hoc Information Sharing (open source)

• Peter Monks - Alfresco (filling in for John Newton)
• Dries Buytaert - Drupal
• Michael Wechner Wyona.com

The enterprise sofware sales model is obsolete.
Open source eats $60B a year from traditional enterprise software. Open source is characterized as the "Ultimate Disruptive Technology".

No cost of sales
Typically 7/10 of sales costs fund sales cycle
In Open Source 7/10 plowed into R&D.

MSFT thinks SharePoint will be next platform beyond Windows.

Humans are social animals. The don't want processes. Need minitools to figure out what to do -- particularly for non-tech doc. Technology gets in the way.

Check out Forbes Office Pranks (http://officepranks.forbes.com/).

Terms to pay attention to

• Taxonomies - important to content management; critical to searching.
• JSR-283 - An upcoming Java API for content retrieval.
• RDF - Resource Descriptor Framework, a language for representing metadata. I considered (and passed on) using RDF in one of our projects, mostly because of what seemed like massive overhead. It's probably worth a second, or third, look.
  

Toolsmith's observations

There is no microblogging tool for the Enterprise (yet).

Many of the tools that make up Web 2.0 have been available for a while. What is different is that a) there is a critical mass of "next generation" tools and b) these tools have been embraced by web communities and the enterprise.

These include:

• Developer communities
• Groups/ forums
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Ajax

Labels: conferences, gilbane08

4:12 PM Permalink | |

 

XPubs: Information integration and the needs of the (product) maintainer

— posted by Sarah

Chris Wood
BAE Systems

Tech pubs managers at BAE, contributor to S1000D standard.

Electronic maintenance (interactive electronic technical manual, or IETM) has been shown to deliver increase in fault finding success, reduction in troubleshooting time, and reduction in maintenance errors. "Fairly comforting"

Market drivers for integrated information...output-based contracts. The Royal Air Force is asking vendors to take on more maintenance activities. The drivers for success for the commercial organization are different from the drivers for the military.

BAE must guarantee that a specific number of aircraft ("platforms") are available to fly at all times. Financial penalties for not meeting those goals.

Offshore commodity outsourcing is putting pressure on the prices that BAE can quote. Price "per page" needs to be on a downward slope.

IETM capability offers an opportunity to integrate support information applications and processes.

ATTAC Contract = a certain number of Tornado aircraft must be available 24x7. BAE is responsible for preflight, postflight, AND other maintenance. Spare parts come out of BAE's budget. Therefore, reducing spare parts "footprint" saves money.

18 million pounds (double that for dollars) over 10 years. Their target is to save more than 18M pounds by including rich data (photos, video, 3D animation), align with actual maintenance activities, tech pubs people on-base as part of integrated engineering team.

Nice example of specific changes in tech docs leading to large cost savings due to fewer returns for repair.

Aha. They improved the official documentation by picking up information that was "plastered on the wall" in the aircraft hangar. In other words, user-generated content!

Information integration...the issue
Too much information, which is necessary and can be integrated, but...who generates it? where? who approves it? who can receive it? is there a recognized authority?

What about information generated by maintenance personnel for use by engineers (the stuff on the wall)? Is there an approval route? How authoritative is it?

In the past, the separation between maintenance and design authority was clear. As the maintenance and design operation moved closer (or become the same in BAE's case), the needed separation of content becomes much more challenging. Does linking from engineering authority content to non-engineering authority corrupt the authoritative content?

What level of authority does information have? Has it been tested? Have is gone through an approval route?

Approved data architecture. The challenge is to define a data architecture that includes all information issues by the design authority for the purpose of operating and/or mainteaining the platform in services, ensuring it is efficient, effective, and safe.

"This is a major content management issue." Indeed.

Many information deliverables go through rigorous approval process, but maintainers have access to other information, too. Official deliverables must be more integrated. Reference data and maintenance procedures come from different places in the organization, but they need to be in alignment. And there are "modifications," which must go in both places.

"This is not a trivial challenge." Yep.

The conflict here is really between data (approved content) and lore (unofficial information about how things really work). The mechanics have the "lore," and need to be persuaded to share it to improve the official documentation over time.

Labels: conferences, xml, xpubs

8:43 AM Permalink | |

 

XPubs: XSL-FO for Documentation Formatting

Monday, June 23, 2008 — posted by Sarah

Mike Miller, Antenna House

For starters, XSL-FO is an XML standard.

XSL-FO is "a pagination markup language describing a rendering vocabulary capturing the semantics of formatting information for paginated presentation." (Ken Holman)

Or, as I like to say, "A document layout described in a text file."

XSL-FO is black box formatting. Can't go back and "tweak" the files to fix them. With FO, you're typically talking about a minimum of a couple hundred pages. Much faster to render automatically rather than by hand in InDesign or FrameMaker.

First commercial products in 2001 from Antenna House and RenderX. Also, open source FOP from Apache in 2001. FO successful in the sense that both commercial companies are doing quite well.

FO more successful than any other technical publishing application other than perhaps TeX and FrameMaker. Probably attributable to the availability of open source (free) and trial versions from commercial vendors (free).

XSL-FO is only concerned with visual display of XML data, which means that the FO file has no semantic content, only formatting instructions.

The FO stylesheet specifies:

• page areas and sets of pages to be used to compose a document for paper (master pages)
• Text flows, areas on pages into which the text and graphics are filled
• Blocks within flow areas (paragraphs)
• Inline areas (character-level formatting)

Advantages:

• Processing and formatting are consistent and automatic.
• Formatting rules are stored separately from the data.
• FO is non-proprietary and human-readable (well, sort of)
• FO less complicated than programming Java or Perl and the like
• Can use stylesheets with different XSLT processors (DITA Open Toolkit)
• Easier integration with other XML standards compliant applications (not trivial, but much easier than other non-standard approaches)
  

Antenna House has been personally involved in about 30 different DITA projects.

Most business documents can be formatted automatically as FO. Rule of thumb: "If it's XML, FO can be applied."

Other applications for FO might include faxes, German railway tickets, correspondence from financial institutions and government.

Typesetting is very complex with issues like widows and orphans and hyphenation. Software can handle this. Human typesetters have been removed from the process, and this shows in amateurish mistakes. But you can use FO to configure something that follows typography rules and give you a professional look and feel.

"Overwhelming benefits" of using FO. Which begs the question: "Why aren't more people using it?" A slide with the benefits of XML showing The Usual (cost, time-to-market, less redundancy, standards-based, localization for cost justification, etc.).

People who use FO: auto manufacturers, cell phone manufacturers, banks, aerospace, government, military, educational

FO not appropriate for documents that are "artistically created."

FO extensions provide support for:

• Document info in PDF
• Bookmarks for PDF
• Column footnotes
• Revision bars
• MathML
• Embedding PDF within PDF
• Column rules
• Punctuation spacing
• Table autospace
• Floats
• Advanced hyphenation
• Barcodes
• several hundred extensions altogether. Antenna House uses multilingual requirements with extensions, such as special spacing requirements in Japanese or justification in Arabic through kashidas.
  

Thus, if you need one of these features, you might get somewhat locked into your rendering engine...the extensions are specific to a particular FO engine.

DITA Open Toolkit reduces complexity of getting set up and produce PDF. Could be configured and producing PDF in "a couple of hours." (Perhaps, but making it look the way you want is going to take a while.) According to Mike, somewhere between a few days and a few months, depending on the complexity of your requirements.

PDF output from DITA

• XSL-FO
• FrameMaker
• troff

Stages:

• Preprocessing. Information is parsed and assembled.
• Transformation. Formatted and generated.

Several software components are required -- DITA Open Toolkit provides all the components you need.

Why not FrameMaker or InDesign?

• Formatting is the tip of the iceberg. (WYSIWYG)
• WYDSIWYN -- What you don't see is what you need, which includes content management, automated formatting, multilingual formatting, global access, project tracking, electronic delivery, network integration

You need WYSIWYG if:

• You need to manually lay out pages.
• No fixed page style
• Need to modify page layout
• Unstructured document formats
• Document format is continuously changing
• Unstructured content
  

If you need WYSIWYG, you need a layout engine like FrameMaker or InDesign. If you need WYDSIWYN, you need XSL-FO.

On the low end, FO is free with FOP. Antenna House is most expensive at $1250 for stand-alone or server license for $5,000.

FO supports more languages than any other solution currently available.

Solving the real problem:

• Improve the total process, not just individual tasks
• Improve organizational effectiveness

XSL-FO is delivering on the XML promise. Don't underestimate it.

First question: Flowing text into typesetting engine results in line breaks that will cause readers difficulty. And this annoys him (as a professional typesetter). We want powerful, automated formatting AND the ability to do WYSIWYG tweaks. Thinks there is a role for a WYSIWYG stage after the automation bit.

I've noticed this on the BBC, too. British people ask really pointed questions.

And in response, Mike says that Antenna House has a solution for this where you create INX (InDesign XML) content (4 minutes) and then you can pull it into InDesign (half an hour), and do some cleanup.

Do all the XSL-FO tools cover 100% of the FO standard? "No, definitely not."

Labels: conferences, dita, xml, xpubs, xsl

7:50 AM Permalink | |

 

X-Pubs keynote: Transforming Legislation Publishing

— posted by Sarah

Brief introduction from Noz Urbina and an overview of the conference from Julian Murfitt. Some X-Pubs housekeeping items, including a flight announcement...

"Should a presentation be boring and sleep deprivation set in, oxygen masks will drop from the ceiling. Please put on your own mask before assisting others."

Hehe.

On to the keynote...John Sheridan, Head of e-Services at the Office of Public Sector Information, National Archives. Eeek, slight problem with slides -- and the presenter just launches right in without them. I bet he's terrified right now, but he looks perfectly composed.

We have slides. "Transforming Legislation Publishing"

Publishing legislation seem dry, but in fact it's quite relevant to the people at large -- and ignorance of the law is no excuse. Legislation documents use XML under the covers. Have been publishing legislation online since 1996 and of course print for a long time before that.

Strengths of their service:

• Immediacy: published online simultaneously with print versions. Important because some measures go into effect the day of their enactment.
• Accuracy: value of service hinges on knowing that the rendition of the online content is the same as the official vellum statement signed by the Queen. (Vellum? Really??)

• Trust: Do customers trust that what they see online is an official source? Based on eye-tracking software, they found when asked about trust, customers looked at the official crest and then responded positively.
• Reach: 1.5 million users, mostly in the UK

Much of the content they were republishing online had not been touched in 10 years or so. However, they had as many as 500,000 external links (that is, links from other web sites pointing to their content). Breaking links was out of the question because the number of links help their content's Google rankings.

Key performance indicator: two clicks. 80 percent of information should be available in two clicks:

1. Google search button.
2. Click link on first page of results.
   

Their audience is demanding. Challenges included:

• Legacy workflows
• Multiple document inputs. Coming from Parliament, government lawyers in 21 departments, Scotland, secondary legislation, Welsh measures, legislation from Northern Ireland, church materials, dual languages in Wales (English and Welsh).
• Tools include: FrameMaker for some groups; Word for others
• Legacy content: 55,000 documents that needed to be repurposed from SGML to XML to improve web publishing.

Primary motivation to improve usability and accessibility of content. Existing HTML content didn't look contemporary.

Persistent linking, "web continuity", overall 60 percent of links to official information are broken. Their solution to "persist" the 500,000 existing links was to provide redirection behavior, so that every URL resolves either to live content or to the government's archive on the web.

XML is the key to solving these assorted issues.

Trying to "future-proof" their work, especially by providing a way to allow for changing web standards (HTML/web standard may change, but we can keep underlying XML).

Legislative documents are highly structured but also have variations over time. Very difficult to capture in a structure. "Parliament trumps your XML schema." You can't say, "Sorry, but that won't work in our schema, so you can't pass that legislation." Must find the balance between accommodating what's needed and "allowing everything."

They developed Crown XML:

The Crown XML Schema for Legislation provides a full and comprehensive encoding for all United Kingdom primary and secondary legislation. It has been written using the World Wide Web Consortium XML Schema language and is the Government's official and authoritative data standard for legislation. Once a piece of legislation has been enacted or made, it is stored using this Schema format. Schema compliant legislation is available in XML for onward supply to legal publishers and others.

They provide sample documents, which even so cover only about half the possibilities in the full schema.

Users have options for various views of the legislation.

Their work leads to the concept of the web as a platform. Not just providing for users to consume, but also to reuse, aggregate, and combine.

Mixing data...hey, cookie dough!

The government's response to Web 2.0 trends. Government should enable information so that citizens can use the information. Doing so will lead not only to better public services, but also to other services, both commercial and noncommercial.

Problems include culture, rights, licensing, intellectual property, and technology challenges. Information becomes infrastructure and potentially as important as roads and other physical infrastructure. Legislation is widely cited content, which becomes infrastructure for other things. Legislation needs to be addressable with fragment identifiers, so that people can cite specific sections or paragraph rather than an entire act.

Why couldn't lawyers add editorial value to legislation in a wiki-type format. Not a job for the state, but something that could be enabled or inhibited by how the legislation is published. Providing addressable content and using standards would allow for third parties to use the legislation as a starting point for additional work.

They provide Atom (RSS) feeds for new legislation.

Library of Congress is an example of a re-user of UK legislation. UK legislation of interest for comparison purposes. They have a "PDF thing going on." Really wanted access to PDF versions of the information. Subscribe to the Atom feed, and the PDF will pop up there as a link.

Expect reuse for very granular areas...discussion of specific industries or topics. (If mad cow disease were to reoccur, expect footpaths to be closer, and a map could show in real-time what's open and what's closed.)

Providing sufficient flexibility into structure without descending into tag soup.

First question: Is the raw XML available to the public?
Yikes. The presenter hesitates and is quite uncomfortable. Seemed like a harmless enough question but apparently not. The answer is that it's available by subscription -- that is, lawyers pay to get access to it. They must balance between their economics and subscription income. They would like to publish XML; seems to be the direction that public policy is going. But "don't want to spend taxpayers' money to subsidize Lexis-Nexis."

Second question: Would these policies extend to others, like the Department for Transport?
Again, this sounds harmless to me, but appears to be quite controversial. Information produced as a core public task ("which is nowhere defined clearly") is public.

Really, when will government policy help the questioner push his employer into using structure? Interesting. I don't think we'd get that question in the U.S., other than in the negative.

Conferences here are so civilized, with the opening session at 10 a.m. Ahhhhh. Tea and cookies, er, biscuits at the breaks. Luvely.

Labels: conferences, web 2.0, xml, xpubs

7:39 AM Permalink | |

 

STC UK: Almost live, part one...Lessons on Introducing XML Publishing

Sunday, June 22, 2008 — posted by Sarah

[updated to correct number of employees]

I attended STC UK's Trends in Technical Communication this weekend. For once, I actually got to be a regular participant in the sessions. And I got to vote on chapter-related matters (as I joined it this year).

Shannon Milsom of Cambridge Silicon Radio delivered an excellent overview of their XML implementation and lessons learned.

When she joined the company eight years ago, she was employee number 69; CSR now employees 4,000 people and 1,000 in the UK1,000 people. They create chips for Bluetooth (market leader), wireless, GPS, and other radio technologies. Most of their customer base is in Asia.

Development is in the UK and UK; "fabless" manufacturing in East Asia. Sales everywhere.

Their original workflow used Word and had all the usual problems you might expect. Styles were corrupt and style guides were not followed. As the company grew, the problems became worse. Single sourcing was needed for shared content; the copy and paste approach led to a risk of missing changes. Content from SMEs needed heavy editing and fixes of bad Word usage -- they created their own individual styles and made a huge mess -- and that assumes that they actually used the official template.

They had a wide range of content, and they classified it by product status (which is interesting and I don't think I've ever seen before):

• Advance information
• Pre-production information
• Production information

Side note: A slide with the various contributors and roles includes an excellent graphic of the software guy as a hippie California dude with a tie-dyed shirt. Sales and marketing on the beach under the umbrella with a laptop.

Their goal was to have:

• Content re-use
• Cost-effective translation
• Version control
• Reviewing

In addition to The Usual, their reasons for moving to XML include the ability to substitute "common text," such as the product name and number, document type, and document status.

Modular authoring results in a workflow where they build documents from common blocks. If a block has been "released" (I think this means reviewed and approved), it can be used as needed.

Benefits they see from XML:

• Shorter production cycle
• Do more with small staff
• Increase throughput
• Marketing can build documents from signed-off information modules
• Use data direct from source (SMEs)
• Ease checking and sign-off
• Has taken human confrontation out of review cycles...approved modules are set in stone and it's easier to reject change requests on those modules
• educe composition and review time
• Version control
• Automated system reduces errors -- nothing falls through the cracks
• Cost-effective language translation...partial localization to save money over localizing everything
  

They considered building their own CMS but eventually bought. After a few trials and a false start with a product that didn't work, they ended up with Ovidius TCToolbox, which they are very happy with.

Lessons learned

• Understanding XML technologies is much more interesting than working in Word and not that difficult
• Choosing freeware, shareware, purchase, or DIY is a big decision
  
• Be sure to choose a mature, well-supported system
• May have to re-invent corporate style to accommodate XML publishing [or face huge costs in replicating existing style]
• Glossary is generated based on terms actually used in the document and pulls content from a 700-entry master glossary
• Solution is still changing
• Beware of solutions that are not fully supported
• Evaluate service vendors by looking at real-world implementations that they have done.
  

Issues to consider

• New way of working
• Will your tech comm group work this way?
• Can you recruit people who can work this way?
• Keeping a single voice in a single-sourced system
• Learning how to write in XML for content re-use
• Writing for one voice helps translation
• Editor/GUI is important to success
• Getting content directly from SMEs
• Budget

Focus on:

• Good training/support and actual solution
• Involve authors in the setup of data and design
• Designate information architect for CMS-based solution
• Identify the skills gap
• Test drive the software
• Focus on your needs and examine the existing process
• Do you need a CMS? What about a staged approach?
• Can you create output, symbols, graphics, equations, xrefs?
• Be prepared to make diversions from original corporate style
• Hidden/rising costs?
• Allow time

Involve...

• Everyone on the journey
• Team for evaluation
• IT system support
• Info architect
• Contributors/reviewers
• Tech communicators

Today's language lesson: "trial" as a verb, as in "We trialled XYZ, but didn't like it."

Labels: change management, conferences, stc2008

4:52 PM Permalink | |

 

Conference showdown

Thursday, June 19, 2008 — posted by Sarah

Tom Johnson's post about the STC conference has sparked a lot of great discussion. You should read it and the comments if you haven't already.

All done?

It seems that the STC conference is getting mixed reviews, and people's experiences seem to diverge quite a bit. The reports from DocTrain West (Vancouver, May) and WritersUA (Portland, March) are much more positive.

Why is this? What makes the STC conference so easy to criticize? Are the
other conferences that much better?

Personal versus impersonal

With 1200 attendees, STC is much larger than either DocTrain (200ish) or WritersUA (500ish). Both DocTrain and WritersUA have well-known organizers -- Scott Abel and Joe Welinske, respectively. Their personal styles couldn't be more different, but they are both well-respected for their events. For STC, there is a Program Committee, an STC staff, and STC leadership. It's much easier to criticize a committee or a collection of committees than an individual.

That said, I think that STC is making some mistakes in their conference planning.

What is the target audience?

The audience for WritersUA is "user assistance professionals." The audience for DocTrain is "people interested in learning about the latest tools, processes, and technologies for technical communicators."

For STC?

STC is an individual membership organization dedicated to advancing the arts and sciences of technical communication. It is the largest organization of its type in the world. Its 14,000 members include technical writers and editors, content developers, documentation specialists, technical illustrators, instructional designers, academics, information architects, usability and human factors professionals, visual designers, Web designers and developers, and translators -- anyone whose work makes technical information available to those who need it.

Wow, that's a mouthful. More importantly, that's a really big, diverse group of people. What happens when you try to put together a conference that serves all of them?

In a comment on Tom's post, I wrote:

One major challenge for STC’s conference is the breadth of topic coverage that’s required. You and I are interested in different things than the academics who are members of STC. Thus, you’ll find entire conference tracks that are targeted toward “others.”

Lindsey Robbins responded:

I totally disagree with trying to focus on academics and professional stuff. Academics have a lot of other organizations and conferences they can attend and STC sorry to say didn’t rank up there with my options when I was in grad school. I think it’s important for academics to influence the industry but its presence at the conference isn’t as important for a track. I really think STC as a whole should focus more on the professional side and development from entry level to experienced.

What is the purpose of the STC conference?

If you said "to advance the knowledge of technical communicators," you win the prize for the most politically correct answer. I think the actual correct answer is, "to bring in significant profits that let STC balance its budget." That is, the conference event is supposed to be profitable and sustainable, but it's also supposed to help sustain the STC itself.

There's also the answer, "to provide a venue for the STC to meet and conduct its annual business" -- the honors banquet, the annual meeting, leadership day, and other activities needed to keep the Society as a whole moving.

I assume that DocTrain and WritersUA are profitable, so why are we offended by STC's desire to do the same for their conference?

I think that the mission of the STC conference is to serve the needs of STC as an organization -- and that's different from serving attendees. Serving attendees one of many priorities.

Infrastructure

You've probably already seen complaints about the lack of wireless connectivity in the Philadelphia Convention Center. There was actually free Wi-Fi, but it was only available in some of the meeting rooms. The trade show floor had Wi-Fi @ $100 per day. I think not.

Unlike Certain Other Conferences, vendors don't get any sort of lunch provided. I was not feeling the love. And since we (as vendors) pay a lot more to get into STC than we do to participate at either DocTrain or WritersUA, I sort of expected some semblance of love or an attempt to at least fake it. The vendor location, which we immediately dubbed "Siberia" (with apologies to any readers from there!), was Not Convenient to attendees. I wonder how many people completely skipped the trade show?

The conference schedule itself was problematic -- others have complained about the lack of advanced topics and about the lack of information about topics. Where was the grid schedule? The session search was annoying. For me, it was broken -- searching on "O'Keefe" didn't bring up my sessions. I resorted to searching on "Sarah" or on the (known) titles of my presentations to figure out when I was presenting. Kind of a problem for people who a) were looking for my presentations (obviously, a cast of thousands...), b) didn't think to search by first name (!), and c) didn't already know the title of the presentation they were looking for.

The opening session on Monday had too many STC business announcements. Either shorten these or move them to Sunday evening. After the opening session, there was a two-hour break intended to drive traffic to the vendors. Starting a conference with a two-hour break is weird. Schedule is for when people are getting tired, like mid-day on Tuesday. They don't need a break immediately after the opening session. That just invites attendees to skip Monday morning.

Speaker issues

As a speaker, I should probably stay away from this one. And I got to attend very few sessions during STC -- I was in Booth Jail. I will point out that my percentile rank at STC is typically much higher than my percentile rank at WritersUA. In other words, assuming that my presentations are of equal quality, the overall speaker quality at WritersUA is higher than at STC.

I gave one presentation on the last day of the conference at 11:30 a.m. Several people told me that they wanted to attend but had to leave to catch a plane. I'm certainly guilty of leaving conferences early myself, but in addition to the not-great time slot, I was presenting at the same time as Ginny Redish and Jared Spool. Ouch. Might I recommend that the program committee try to avoid putting highly rated speakers in concurrent time slots?

Content

The STC call for proposals is ridiculously early relative to the conference -- and it's better than it used to be. It's impossible to do bleeding edge presentations with 9 months of lead time required for the proposals.

STC used to provide speakers with a $75 or $100 discount off the conference (and a requirement to register in order to present!). This policy has changed; speakers are given free admittance, but the perception problem lingers. Andrea Carrero writes on the STC Forum on June 11, 2008:

As a speaker in 2006, I got $75 off of one day's registration costs for the conference. Perhaps if the monetary reward were a little better (say, the day you speak you get registration--for the day--for free), perhaps more people would apply and there would be a larger selection of topics.

The review process for proposals is opaque; if a proposal is turned down, you get a form letter that offers no useful information. I can think of numerous reasons to decline a proposal that have little or nothing to do with the proposal quality. For example:

• Sessions on this topics didn't draw people the previous year.
  
• Another speaker submitted on the same topic and only one could be accepted.
• The speaker had one proposal accepted, so the second proposal was declined to make room for a wider variety of speakers.
  

Instead, STC sends out a form letter that implies that the rejection is the speaker's fault, and recommends areas for general improvement, such as a more compelling topic or putting more effort into the proposal document.

Again, let's compare Scott and Joe's approaches -- they look for specific topics, they discuss the topics with potential presenters, and they look closely at the feedback from previous years when deciding which speakers to accept. (Oh, and if you'd like get on the speaker blacklist, my recommendation is to cancel at the last minute because "I'm busy." They HATE that.) This process is clearly less objective than the proposal-with-review-committee approach, but I think that they are less concerned about objectivity and more concerned with putting together a compelling conference.

Social events

Many of the social events at STC were tied up with The Society. I attended the honors banquet this year for the first time in, well, ever. (I was one of 12 new associate fellows. Sorry to bite the hand that, uh, honors me.) Actually, the banquet was kind of fun. There's something deeply surreal about seeing my tech comm buddies playing dress-up. (Yes, I wore a dress. Shut. Up.)

But Tom makes a rather valid point about the need for social events that work for the attendees at large.

Also, as others have said, the band was too loud. The value of the conference, for me, is in networking, and that's hard to do when you can't hear each other.

A delicate point about attendees

The STC audience seems, on average, to be much older than the audience at DocTrain. WritersUA is somewhere in the middle.

I don't think this bodes well for STC down the road.

Why aren't there more non-U.S. attendees?

I can think of a few:

• Distance, obviously. It's a long way from Europe or Asia to the U.S. for a conference. The TCWorld conference in Wiesbaden, Germany, may be an easier trip.
• U.S. passport and border controls are an issue. Some visitors are offended by the fingerprinting program (all non-U.S. citizens are fingerprinted when they enter the U.S.). I am offended on their behalf, but there's not a whole lot I can do about it.
  
• Language barrier. Attendees who speak English as a second language may find a certain lack of consideration for non-native English speakers. I try to be careful about this in "international" venues, but I'm afraid that I don't consider the STC conference to be particularly international. That said, I think the first two questions I got after my presentation this year were in excellent, but accented, English, so I'll pay attention next year.
• Culture barrier. The STC conference is very American. Not just English-speaking.
  

I met some very interesting people at the conference, had some great side discussions out in the halls, and reconnected with my conference buddies. I'll be back next year assuming this post doesn't get me banned.

For the record, I have offered to help STC evaluate proposals this year. (And have done so once or twice before.) No idea whether they'll take me up on that or not.

(Thanks to Alan Houser, who contributed ideas to this blog.)

Labels: conferences, stc2008

10:41 AM Permalink | |

 

Federating your Enterprise Content

Wednesday, June 18, 2008 — posted by Simon Bate

Summarizing an interesting day at Gilbane San Francisco 2008.

The Gilbane conference focuses on Enterprise and Web Content Management. Not necessarily something directly in Scriptorium's business, but there are many, many tie-ins with what we do do. In particular, structured documentation and XML are golden to Enterprise Content Management Systems.

The keynote address was delivered by Udi Manber, VP of Engineering for Google. One of the more interesting points in his talk was the engineering process within his group. An engineer doesn't ask permission to do anything. Instead, they experiment, evaluate the results of what they did, and then get approval based on the data.

This address was followed by a discussion between Dan Farber, Editor-in-Chief at CNET news, and Denis Brown, SVP of Business User Imagineering at SAP. Some points:

Denis described the "consumerization" of the workforce. That is, just as people access Amazon to order books or CDs, when the go to work, they expect to be able to use corporate intranet web sites to perform similar tasks. AND the sites need to work just a smoothly as Amazon.

One topic that has arisen again and again is the security issues presented by Web 2.0. This led me to wonder about IT protections on web traffic. In my experience, IT has often presented a big hurdle for technical documentation teams to make content available on externally facing corporate web sites. There are often reams of paperwork to be filled out...and even more if the pages might be updated more than once every 6 months. Web 2.0 means traffic and content will be flowing both ways. Oh boy.

In the next session I attended, Steven Arnold discussed aspects of his recent Gilbane report "Beyond Search". Beyond his gruff (world-weary?) demeanor he had some good observations. Among them: Enterprise search doesn't exist (because most enterprise docs are not available for indexing); 50-75% of users don't think Enterprise search is working for them; there is no one-size-fits-all search, buy what works for your organization and data; most Fortune 500 companies have 5 to 10 separate search engines in house.

Ross Mayfield (http://www.socialtext.com/blog/) brought some fresh air to a large panel on Collaboration and Social Computing. All presenters had an enterprise focus; that's what they do. But Ross' discussion of "people as first-class objects" was really good to hear.

Labels: conferences, gilbane08

10:06 PM Permalink | |

 

STC 2008: Wrap-up

Thursday, June 05, 2008 — posted by Sarah

My next round of conferences will be in the UK. I'm leading an XSL workshop for STC UK on June 22 and giving a presentation on June 21 as part of the Trends in Technical Communication event. Then, it's onward to X-Pubs, where I'll be discussing the implications of Web 2.0 on technical communication.

As far as I know, after that I'm done with the conference circuit until the fall. However, senior technical consultant Simon Bate will be attending the Gilbane conference in San Francisco and participating on a DITA panel. Please contact us if you'd like to set up a meeting at the conference.

Labels: change management, conferences, stc2008, xml

1:44 PM Permalink | |

 

STC 2008: Unifying Content Development and Localization at Palm

Tuesday, June 03, 2008 — posted by Sarah

[Update: I forgot to identify the presenter, Jane Faraola of Palm.]

(Palm is a client of ours.)

The problem Palm faced was outright hostility between content development and localization. The origin of this was conflict because of late-breaking changes after the "declared" UI freeze. The content hand-off to localization might have to be repeated up to eight times after repeated UI freezes.

Things had to change -- meetings were contentious and localization said at one point that they
"wanted to break our fingers."

Timeline...

1/06 initiative kickoff
conferences, vendor demos

3/07 reorganization joined UA and localization services

investigate
big change, big impact
* adopt structure authoring, possibly a new toolset
* consider DITA
* select and implement a CMS
* select and implement TMS
* add staff to handle add'l workload
* select and implement a hosted PM tool

small change, big impact
* adopt structure authoring
* select and implement a translation management system
* select and implement a hosted PM tool

Challenges
* resistance from authoring staff
* lack of IT support
* product dev times with no room for error
* limited budget

They chose...small change, big impact
* structure authoring/FrameMaker 8
* adopt XSLT for conversion
* implement TMS

tried CMS pilot, but figured a year to implement
didn't think CMS space was fully mature
FM/DITA had issues with tables, indexing
XML not the greatest tool for publishing printed doc
Palm timelines do not allow time to fail

head-to-head competition between LionBridge and SDL for TM tools

moved to str FrameMaker
October 07 loc tool

initial metrics
* FM7 to FM8 in less than two months
Success!
* TMS up and running in less than 5 weeks
6 months with a lot of hiccups
* lower overall authoring, DTP and conversion costs
Not yet. Authoring and DTP costs are holding steady, conversion costs are down.
* reduce loc timelines
Not yet. Only three months in, but optimistic

Rising requirements for localization...
2006 - 17% of deliverables in non-English
2007 - 30%
2008 - 35%

Integrating content dev and localization is a cost-effective approach to creating the highest quality multilingual deliverables

Active project management from both teams

Headaches

* more email
* more process
* continuous change
* pressure to "not touch the doc"
* defining ownership on a product

What's still needed?
* effective tools to simplify localization
* simplify processes
* create great content for local markets instead of "just localize"

new mission statement
empower users worldwide to successfully incorporate stuff

English development versus localization staff = 1-to-1 ratio

SDL TMS is workflow automation. manages translation memory. very customized workflow.

Interesting overview of an organizational change that was needed to be more effective.

Labels: conferences, stc2008

9:27 AM Permalink | |

 

STC 2008: Blog round-up and some initial impressions

Monday, June 02, 2008 — posted by Sarah

I attended a bit of the opening session, but then got sucked into BoothLand and never got out into any sessions today.

But never fear, for there are quite a few other places to get STC conference coverage this year. We have:

Twitter: Follow the #stc2008 tag at twemes.com

Tom Johnson notes that Twitter participation is abysmally low at under 1%. I was excited because there was any at all. I guess my expectations are lower than his.

Tom has also posted his notes from his panel on marketing in a Web 2.0 world.

I'm not finding much blog coverage of the conference. I find that disappointing. I found a few people who said that they are at the conference and will be blogging, but no conference content just yet.

There are two group blogs at ScribbleLive here and here.

A few tidbits on the STC wiki.

Scott Abel has posted his slide deck for Augmenting Your Technical Documentation with User-Generated Content.


The Managing Technical Documentation blog has a writeup of the opening panel.

Based on a highly unscientific survey of a few fellow consultants and business owners, the economy is not directly affecting our business. Most everyone is extremely busy.

Adobe announced Acrobat 9 today. I don't have any useful assessment of that tool just yet, but I think it's worth noting that the Adobe booth had up-to-date graphics showing Acrobat 9 as part of the Tech Comm Suite version 1.3. (Did I mention that my standards are low?)

Tomorrow (Tuesday), I'm doing two panels:

• Getting Inside Information on Collaboration, 10:30 a.m., Room 112AB. In this panel, moderated by Char James-Tanny, my focus will be on building team culture across geographical and cultural boundaries.
  


• What is Structured Authoring?, 1:30 p.m., Room 103A. Expect to see a quip-laden discussion between Alan Houser, Neil Perlin, and me about our respective definitions of "structured authoring" and why each of the others is wrong. (Neil and I did a session together at another conference that we labeled the "XML Death Match." The official title was something so boring I've forgotten it. After I referred to Neil as the Time Life operator earlier today (in my defense, he was wearing a headset for a live demo), I expect serious trouble. Wish me luck, although of course I deserve any revenge he might dish out.

Tuesday evening is the honors banquet, where new associate fellows (like me!) and fellows will be...inducted? hazed? I'm not really sure, but check back on Wednesday and I'll let you know about the whole thing. Except for the secret handshake.

Oops. (Can you be kicked out before induction?)

Wednesday at 10:30 a.m., I'm doing my last session, Paradigm Shifts are Never Pretty. Drop by to see my highly scientific Taxonomy of Problem Writers.

Labels: conferences, stc2008

11:38 PM Permalink | |

 

Coming attractions

Saturday, May 10, 2008 — posted by Sarah

I greatly enjoyed my time in Vancouver for DocTrain West.

Unfortunately, the process of getting to and from Vancouver is shaping up to be one of the "typical" travel nightmares. Outbound, I missed a connection (because of weather) by a few minutes, which resulted in a six-hour penalty in travel time.

Inbound back to RDU, I'm writing this on the Vancouver to Dallas plane, which is currently parked at the gate in Vancouver and shows no signs of departing anytime soon. Now, I'd prefer that they fix the hydraulic leak before we go, but it seems as though lately, the on-time rates have gone south. (Hmmm. I live in the South and it occurs to me that this metaphor is a bit locale-ist.) let's try again...the on-time rates have gone down the toilet. (oops. That's sure to offend someone and also lead to Google search hits I'd prefer not to have.) ....the on-time rates really s*** (this is getting worse instead of better). ...the airlines appear to be having some challenges (cough, cough) with their already lousy on-time operations. [Update: We departed almost three hours late with a new, non-leaking hydraulic component.] [Update2: I'm posting this from DFW.]

Anyway, I assume I'll get back at some point. Meanwhile, the conference itself was fun. Got to catch up with lots of people, saw some interesting presentations, and did two sessions that seemed to go reasonably well.

This is only the second time I've done a hands-on workshop in a conference context. Attempting to do one of these sessions is right behind high places, spiders, and eggplant on my list of phobias.

Why? I have little or no control over installation and configuration issues. For an XSL workshop, the minimum requirements are a Java runtime and an XSL parser (both free and open source and therefore a bit challenging to install). A text editor intended for programming (such as Oxygen) would be nice, too. It's impossible to get everyone configured ahead of time, so we end up scrambling to make everything work at the beginning of class. And then we have essentially infinite possible problems ranging from problems with wireless connections to platform variations to security problems (as in, you can't install anything because IT has locked your machine down).

This time around, things actually went extremely well. We had the usual issues, but everything got resolved (which isn't always the case). Although I had rather a large group for a hands-on session, we stayed on track with the schedule and even crammed in some extra material. (Private note to participants: Sorry about the exploding brain problem.) My favorite "problem" in this workshop was in attempting to help one participant. I started typing something and got unexpected input, which was because my touch-typing doesn't work on a non-U.S. keyboard. My attempts to locate the <, >, :, and = keystrokes were truly pathetic. The keyboard owner was nice enough not to laugh at me as she pointed to the correct keys.

Anyway, I'll be attempting this particular trick again at the upcoming Trends in Technical Communication (STC UK) event in Birmingham, so if you're interested in a fun-filled day of declarative programming, you should join us!

After Birmingham, I'll be attending X-Pubs in London. At that conference, I'm presenting the live version of our Web 2.0 white paper. We are attempting to provide some insight into how technical communication and user-generated content will intersect.

If you'll be at either of these events, please let me know.

And finally, after a nudge from a coworker, I have set up a Twitter account. You can find me at okeefe_scr. I'm not sure where that experiment will go, but I thought I'd give it a try.

Labels: conferences, doctrainwest08, travel, web 2.0

6:20 PM Permalink | |

 

Portland, here we come

Thursday, February 21, 2008 — posted by Sarah

March 16-19, you will find three of us at the WritersUA conference in Portland, Oregon. We'll be in the trade show booth and Sarah is doing a presentation and a panel.

And what does this have to do with acrobatic Peeps? We have discovered that Cirque du Soleil will be in Portland during the conference, just down the road from the conference hotel. So, we are planning to attend a performance on Monday evening (8 p.m.). If you'd like to join us, drop me an email.

Labels: conferences, writersua2008

2:20 PM Permalink | |

 

tekom: Benefits for North American writers

Tuesday, November 13, 2007 — posted by Sarah

My post about tekom generated some interesting comments, including this one, which I will address in pieces:

Thanks for this info. I've been lobbying my company to send me to Tekom for the last few years, unsuccessfully. I submitted 2 times for presentations but both were rejected. Our company is in Concord, Massachusetts, USA.
Could you discuss the benefits to North American writers attending such an international event. Are there things you learned there you will not learn anywhere else (business/tech stuff of course )

Interesting question.

The perspective at tekom is different from STC. For example, there was a session on how to integrate outsourcing into a documentation effort. Given the very diverse audience, you have people on all sides of the outsourcing issue. In the U.S., the outsourcing discussions generally center around how evil it is. :-)

There is a heavy emphasis on discussing globalization, localization, and internationalization issues.

A product that ships with defects in documentation is considered a defective product in the European Union. Therefore, you also see discussions of regulatory requirements. In the U.S., these discussions are confined to the few industries that are regulated -- medical and nuclear come to mind.

If you have a significant market outside the U.S., or competitors based outside the U.S., I think tekom is well worth it.

Any suggestions on what types of presentations have a chance of being accepted? I do not have a long presentation resume, and I feel Tekom prefers more experienced presenters, not giving less experienced presenters a chance.

I think you've answered your own question. STC used to have an explicit policy of "giving less experienced presenters a chance," but they have moved away from doing so in an attempt to improve the overall presentation quality. The focus is on the attendee experience rather than the opportunity for presenters.

So...to improve your chances at tekom (or anywhere else), I would recommend getting more presentation experience. That probably means presenting a local user groups or STC chapters, and then moving up to regional and then national events. Once you have a reasonable U.S.-based presentation list with excellent evaluations, you could try tekom again.

Pay attention to the evaluations you get from the events where you do present. Fix the issues that are raised. Work on your presentation skills.

Send in proposals with compelling content. A conference committee may take a chance on an unknown or inexperienced presenter if the proposal is sufficiently fascinating.

And finally, presenting to a European audience, even in English, is quite a bit more challenging than presenting to a U.S. audience. Although most Europeans in attendance speak good-to-excellent English, there is still a language barrier. That means speaking more slowly, avoiding idioms, watching your accent, and so on. That does inflict an additional cognitive load on the presenter. And then you have the following:

• Hooking up a laptop to 240V current (requires an inexpensive adapter. Hope you remembered yours)
• Jet lag. According to one study I saw, cognitive ability is reduced by 40% in people experiencing jet lag. Based on my experiences, I think that's too low, at least for the first day in-country. By day two, I'm usually reasonable coherent. Allow some time to recover from jet lag.
  
• Body language is different. It's difficult to read a European audience if you only have experience with U.S. audiences.
  
• English language barrier. The vast majority of Europeans speak British English, not American English. Sounds trivial, but isn't.

I hope some of my European readers will add their opinions and ideas in the comments.

Labels: conferences, tekom

2:59 PM Permalink | |

 

tekom: Some thoughts on Germany

Saturday, November 10, 2007 — posted by Sarah

The tekom conference wrapped up yesterday (Friday), but like several other North American attendees, I stayed an extra day to bring the airfare down. (The difference between leaving Saturday and leaving Sunday -- over $1000. One extra night in the hotel? Significantly less than $1000. Extra night in hotel plus money spent while sightseeing on Saturday? Didn't look too bad until I converted back to Euros. At least I didn't buy the killer boots, NICKY. [Nicky: "They were on sale! And they fit! And it was only 80 euros." Me: "Per boot."]

Some differences between North American conferences and this one. Overall, attendees were:

• more likely to be men (my rough estimate is a 65%/35% male/female split; the numbers would be reversed at STC or similar conferences).
• more international. In my workshop registration list, I counted 18 participants from German-speaking countries; the rest were from all over Europe and the rest of the world--places like Italy, Scotland, and China. STC would be ecstatic with an international component of 30%. The overall numbers for the entire conference were probably lower as I was presenting in the English-language tcworld sessions (as opposed to the German-language tekom sessions).
• much better dressed than the average U.S. conference-goer.
• smaller (cough) than the average U.S. conference-goer.
• more in number. The estimated I heard was approximately 1800 attendees for the dual conferences, plus another 1000 that only visited the trade show floor.
• unlikely to be from North America. I don't think I saw any American attendees who were not either a) presenting or b) participating in the trade show.
• very polite as an audience. Although most participants spoke very good English, it's obviously more difficult to listen to and comprehend a presentation being given in a language that is not your native language. As a result, I think participants were busy concentrating on comprehension rather than on challenging the presenter with questions. Several people did ask me some pretty interesting questions after my presentations, and I think they did just didn't feel comfortable standing up in a room of 30 (or 130) attendees and trying to formulate a question quickly. In English.
  

The trade show component was enormous, and the booths were unbelievably elaborate. I think I might have mentioned the chocolate fountain, but there were also spinning logos atop the booths, juice bars, champagne, pretzels, croissants, fresh fruit, and assorted tchochkes including stuffed hamsters. Yodeling stuffed hamsters. Sadly, the trade show floor was so big that I could never find the stuffed hamster booth, even though my directions were to "look for the booth where the staff is wearing lederhosen." (Nobody could remember that company behind the yodeling rodents, which I suppose is bad.)

I was pleasantly surprised to find the hotel, conference center, and restaurants smoke-free. Apparently, an ordinance passed recently (since the last conference). (Discussion of the anticipated law, in German, here.)

Wiesbaden was founded because of hot springs and became a resort town back in Roman times. (more on Wiesbaden from Wikipedia in English and German) People still come to the various bathhouses (no, not THAT kind) for the water, which is said to have healing qualities. The hot baths go up to 66 degrees. Celsius. For those of us who think in Fahrenheit, that's...um....really, really hot. (150.8 degrees Fahrenheit)

In some of the baths, you are supposed to be "textilfrei." Hmmmm.

At several places in the city, you can see (and drink) water coming from the hot springs. The Kochbrunnen ("cooking well") has hot, salty water coming up out of the ground. While we looking at it and noticing the sulfurous smell, a woman walked up, filled a glass, and drank it down.

A colleague from a German consulting company stopped by our booth and said (in German), "I have come to assassinate you." (!) Now, I speak German fluently, but that was a new one. When you don't live in a country, you miss out on all the new slang and idioms. It turns out that he was not mad at me. The expression is similar to "I've come to attack you," which in a certain casual context might mean, "I've come to ask you to do something."

I've been de facto translator in several places. The waiters, of course, all speak English quite well, but when they discover that I speak German at the table (and nobody else does), they tend to start talking only with me and asking questions like, "And what does SHE want?" I suppose this is because they figure that speaking English runs the risk of miscommunication, but it does seem a bit impolite to treat the non-German speaker like a non-entity. One waitress did a great job of talking to me in German and everyone else in English, which was quite entertaining.

And finally, a sad story about being clueless. For dinner one evening, we went to a sort of quick-service Italian place. When you walk into the restaurant, you are handed a card, which apparently has an RFID chip. You go to the pasta station to order dinner, and the cook behind the counter rings up your order, waves your card at the register, and hands it back. Same thing at the bar. When you're done, you take your card to the cashier, who waves it at her register, which then brings up your bill.

So, after a tasty dinner, we go to pay, and after the waving operation, and a swipe (!) of my credit card, the cashier hands me a pen and a blotter-looking thing. I just assume this must be some new magic signature-capturing device, so I start to sign the blotter. The cashier looks at me kind of funny and says, "Um...it's still on its way." And about 5 seconds later, she places the PAPER credit card slip on the blotter. Oh. I console myself with the fact that at least she had something entertaining to tell her friends over beer later.

Labels: conferences, tekom

11:24 AM Permalink | |

 

tekom: Cultural awareness 101

Wednesday, November 07, 2007 — posted by Sarah

The difference between North American trade shows and European trade shows:


Chocolate fountains at the booth

I think I'm officially speechless.

Note: Char informs me that there was also sushi. At a different booth. The Cognitas people have a juice bar. And rumor has it that the beer taps will open on the show floor at 6 p.m.

Labels: conferences, tekom

11:22 AM Permalink | |

 

It's the time of the season for...

Thursday, November 01, 2007 — posted by Sarah

...conferences?

I'm finishing up my slides for next week's tekom/TCWorld conference (don't tell the organizers). Meanwhile, registration for next year's WritersUA conference has just opened. It will be held in mid-March in Portland, Oregon.

As usual, Joe has put together a great program. Zip on over, take a look, and start working on your funding.

I will be doing a session in the Emerging Skills track entitled, Friend or Foe? The Role of Web 2.0 in User Assistance.

May and June 2008 are already stuffed with conferences. It's a little odd to look at my calendar and realize that I had better start thinking about where to put my summer vacation.

Labels: conferences, web 2.0

2:28 PM Permalink | |

 

DocTrain: Keynote from Kelly Stirman

Thursday, October 18, 2007 — posted by Sarah

Kelly Stirman of Mark Logic

Most important trend: task and role aware publishing

What if a phone were aware of meeting times and automatically went into vibrate mode?

Documentation: When editing CSS in Dreamweaver, O'Reilly book on HTML should display the relevant CSS information.

Lexus: A customized car manual with relevant color, my name, my options.

Electronic flight bag: Provides supporting information that is relevant to current status. (No takeoff information when cruising at 30,000 feet.)

A highly visual presentation, which loses a lot in a blog. A discussion of different types of hammers, ranging from a rock to the innards of a Steinway -- we want to create the right tool for the right job.

How to get to task and role aware:

• XML
• granular access
• content logic

XML provides the common language for information.

Language and meaning are two very different things.

XML is also the Socratic method. Communication using a predefined set of rules.

Schema or DTD is a contract.

Oops. Now we're doing an XML overview. Nice overview, but appropriate for this audience?

Why XML?

• Distinguish between meaning and rendering (i.e. separate content and presentation; we've heard that before)
• Relationship between meaning and rendering can be many-to-many. One piece of content, many types of output. Also, one type of output, many pieces of content as input.

Granular access

• Library: basically a "self-service" model. You go to the library to find your books.
• Books are atomic -- you can't break a printed book into smaller parts -- you can't check out a chapter from a library.
• Need a query language for a tool (this is where we veer into the business case for Mark Logic products)
• Example: SafariU. Custom course readers for university professors.

Content logic

....and he's running over his time, so I must go.

Mr. Stirman is trained in philosophy and it shows. Very interesting presentation, and a different perspective from what we're used to.

Labels: conferences, doctraineast07

9:08 AM Permalink | |

 

DocTrain: Keynote from David Platt

— posted by Sarah

I'm at DocTrain East in Boston this week.

We're starting out with a keynote from David Platt, author of Why Software Sucks...and what you can do about it.

Internet users in 1994 were almost exclusively academics/researchers; about 2 million total. Lots of technical support; no deadlines.

In 2006, we have 1 billion WWW users and almost all of them are using personal computers. New computer users and no support.

Platt's First, Last, and Only Law of User Experience Design:

Know Thy User for He is Not Thee

72% of adult population doesn't have a college degree, but of course software is developed almost exclusively by people with college degrees.

"Normal people don't drive stick shifts". But a lot of programmers prefer them -- inconvenient but more control. Software developers like the process of driving the car; normal people prefer to just get there.

Software applications tend to sacrifice ease of use (which developers don't care about) for fine-grained control (which developers do care about but users don't).

Users just want the software to work.

Interfaces matter -- the example is ups.com, which is pain to navigate. However, you can drop a UPS tracking number into a Google toolbar and get the tracking information in one click. Thus, Google is a better UPS tracker than ups.com.

Constant friction -- extra clicks cost money because they take time.

Catastrophic error -- Mars Orbiter, medical errors...

Personal public ridicule -- People publish lists like "web pages that suck"

Five ways to make a project suck less:

1. Add [a person who does not know the internal workings of the software] to the design team. I think he might have lost some of the audience when he said that tech writers would be ideal for this.
2. Break convention when needed (Quicken/MS Money never offer to save your content; they just do it.)
3. Don't let edge cases complicate the mainstream
4. Instrument -- carefully. Use feedback agents to get information about how software is being used.
5. Always ask: is this design decision taking us closer to "just working" or farther away?

Entertaining, but he's used to presenting to nearly all-male, all-programmer audiences, and much of what he's doing here was preaching to the choir.

Labels: conferences, doctraineast07, humor

7:56 AM Permalink | |

 

Win free admission to DocTrain East

Wednesday, August 29, 2007 — posted by Alan Pringle

We're giving away free admission to the DocTrain East 2007 conference (October 16-20 in Lowell, MA). The contest closes on Friday (August 31), so there is still time for you to get your name in the hat:

Enter the drawing

We will announce the winner next week. Sarah, Matt, and I plan to attend DocTrain, and Sarah will be presenting, too.

And now for the fine print: Travel costs, accommodations, and other arrangements are the responsibility of the winner.

Labels: conferences

8:10 AM Permalink | |

 

Link round-up

Thursday, June 14, 2007 — posted by Sarah

I blogged during my vacation, so I suppose it's only fair that after returning to work, I took a blogging vacation.

Here are some recent items of interest:

• Conference assessment. In his new blog, Group Wellesley Wire, Alan Houser provides capsule reviews of tech comm conferences. It's a great overview, especially if you're trying to find just one conference to attend this year. I would only add that tekom, in Germany, is technically the largest conference in the group (not STC). However, many of the sessions are in German, which might prove a little challenging. X-Pubs, which was just held near London, is also worth a mention.
• Indexing/taxonomy. If you have any interest in this subject, head on over to Seth Maislin's Indexing Blog.
• Upcoming conferences. I will be at O'Reilly's Tools of Change in Publishing conference in San Jose next week. Looking forward to a few days of conference attendance without speaker duties. This should be an interesting change of perspective. In October, I'll be at DocTrain, and I have tentative plans for tekom/tcworld in Wiesbaden, Germany, in November.
• Global calendars. I was asked to speak at a very interesting conference in Europe this fall. Unfortunately, the conference is during the same week as the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday.
  This made me think about calendars -- we have grievous difficulty scheduling classes without running into any U.S. holidays. If we have to schedule around holidays in multiple countries, there might not be any viable days left over!
  

Labels: conferences

10:35 AM Permalink | |

© 2009, Scriptorium Publishing Services. Legal Stuff