I am constantly reflecting on the answer to this question: How can I draw upon the enthusiasm, intelligence, and skill of willing volunteers all around me to take our organization’s site to the next level? This goal mostly relates to my involvement in my organization’s technology blog, which has about 80 volunteer writers. In my post about what I learned during 2011 as a technical … more »

We had a couple of writing interns join our group this month. To track writing assignments for the technology blog, I’ve been using JIRA. JIRA is a bug tracking tool from Atlassian (the same company that makes Confluence). It’s typically used by software teams to track bugs during software development projects. You can add comments to items, assign items to team members, assign the items … more »

Lately I have been logging a lot of bugs in JIRA, our bug-tracking database. In one day I logged 25 bugs. This past week I logged about 60 overall. It feels good to log bugs. I feel like I’m finding valuable gaps in the application where code simply isn’t working. Despite these benefits to the project team, in a recent triage meeting with the lead … more »

Some years ago, I used to suffer from developer neglect, or to use a more scientific term, from a kind of information exclusion complex. You know what I’m talking about. Developers make updates to the interface, often at the last minute, and don’t let the tech writer know what changed. As a result, the help is wrong and out of date. It’s a frustrating experience … more »

LugIron recently praised a video response that a vendor made to a customer, calling it “an outstanding example of Social Documentation at work.” The customer loved the video, especially given that it was personally created by the company founder. Ten years ago, such a quick response wouldn’t have been possible except at a large time cost from the company. But with the software tools today, … more »