Search results

Upcoming STC Webinar: Creating Help in a Wiki Environment

by Tom Johnson on Jun 5, 2012
categories: technical-writing wikis

I'm giving an STC webinar this Thursday titled "Creating Help in a Wiki Environment." Here's the description:

Creating Help in a Wiki Environment

Thursday, 7 June | 4:00–5:00 PM EDT (GMT-4)

One advantage to working in a wiki environment is to enable collaboration among a community of users. Without this collaboration, wikis offer little more than ease of publishing. But how do you build a community of users? How do you invite intelligent edits and contributions to your growing body of wiki information? How do you communicate needs, coordinate tasks, and build publishing momentum across a wide swath of community contributors, each with different motivations and backgrounds? Most importantly, how do you persuade potential contributors to join your cause? This webinar will look at the dynamics of community and how to structure your efforts to encourage maximum contributions from community members.

You can register for the webinar here.

I realize that with my When Wikis Succeed and Fail post, this topic is not what you would expect from me. But remember that topics are planned months in advance. In this webinar, I will tell the story of what attracted me to wikis, my efforts to have community volunteers write, what worked well and what didn't, and the next evolution in collaborative authoring: crowdsourced documentation testing.

For those who can't make the webinar, I've written a 10,000 word essay on the topic. I'm still refining that essay but will publish it soon.

June 7, 2012 update:

My slides from the webinar are available below:

About Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson

I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.

If you're a technical writer and want to keep on top of the latest trends in the tech comm, be sure to subscribe to email updates below. You can also learn more about me or contact me. Finally, note that the opinions I express on my blog are my own points of view, not that of my employer.