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Title:

Will User-Generated Content Wipe Out Technical Writers?

Your vote:
Yes No
Organizer:
Sarah O'Keefe, Scriptorium Publishing
Description:
Official technical documentation competes for attention against user-generated content. If organizations want their information to be relevant, they must shorten publishing cycles, allow readers to comment and modify documentation, and increase the candor of their documentation. Otherwise, users will ignore the professional content.
Questions
Answered:
  1. What are the best and worst features of official technical documentation?
  2. What are the best and worst features of user-generated content?
  3. What sort of information should be in official documentation?
  4. How can technical communicators shorten their publication cycles?
  5. How can technical communicators take advantage of community contributions to help support documentation?
  6. Will technical writers join buggy whip makers and go extinct? Are technical writers doomed?
  7. How must technical communications change to accommodate user-generated content?
  8. Why are corporations afraid of user-generated content?
  9. Can corporations prevent user-generated content? (um, no)
  10. What will technical writing (the job) look like 10 years from now?
Level:
Intermediate
Category:
Community / Online Community, Content, User Generated Content, Writing / Technical Writing
Type:
Solo
Event:
Interactive 2010
Louis Marascio
on 17/8/09
This would be a great panel. Sarah is a great speaker and a very knowledgeable industry veteran of technical communication. What I particularly like about this panel is that it is at the intersection of social media (user generated content) and an "old-school" industry, documentation. I'm sure the discussion about how documentation may or may not change due to that disruption would be very interesting.
Barry Hobbs
on 17/8/09
I think small- and medium-sized companies are starting to realize the impact of documentation on their user experience. Some small companies are surviving solely on "community" documentation, which ranges in quality between excellent to "1 h0pez U sp34k l33t". Some large companies are surviving solely on an army of tech-writers pumping out potentially useless information for the average user, hoping they get coverage. I think there is a solution in the middle, and would like to hear more about what's coming next. This would be of particular interest to small, successful companies that don't have the financial backing to waste time with trying three or four solutions, and want to make an educated choice as they grow.
Anne Gentle
on 17/8/09
Looks like a fantastic presentation and I wholeheartedly agree with Sarah's assessment of the future of documentation. Sarah's got a great sense of humor and her outlook and presentation style will offer real zing to the SXSW Interactive crowd. Vote 'er up!
Paul Sholar
on 17/8/09
I really wish someone could first do the work of tracking the history of official versus user-generated documentation for some representative tech product(s) of relatively recent vintage and identify how the user-generated content (and which kinds) happened in the first place and then proliferated (if it did). Gathering today's opinions on these questions is one things, but gathering some solid research first is another. "Shortening the pubs cycle" is not a new issue, is a known problem whose answer is economic in nature, and is not key for coping with user-generated content. A forward-looking tech company must plan its tech docs to make a place for user-generated content. That means (1) disclosing in some way its documentation agenda, (2) prioritizing which topics need to be published, when, and by whom, (3) providing web-based tools for users to contribute to that agenda. Reward users who author "nice to have" topics that describe usages beyond the product's "officially sanctioned" application scenarios.
Sarah O'Keefe
on 19/8/09
Hi Paul,

I disagree that "shortening the pubs cycle" is not key for coping with user-generated content. If the pubs cycle is very lengthy and updates take a long time to get into the official documentation, users may turn to unofficial sources of content because they know that the official stuff is never up to date. I spoke with someone who manages military aircraft documentation and had run into this problem -- the mechanics were finding unapproved ways to supplement the official documentation because updates took many months.
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