I'd Rather Be Writing » Web 2.0

Google Plus as a Professional Communication Tool

Tom Johnson — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 13:43:29 +0000

Shay Shaked

The following is a guest post by Shay Shaked.

I’ve been messing around with Google Plus for about two weeks now. It occurred to me, after reading Tom Johnson’s latest post about content strategy and listening to his podcast about the same topic, that Google Plus is, perhaps unintentionally, the best professional social network with the right usage of content strategy.

I’m not going to explain what Google Plus is in this post. If you want to learn more about it, there are hundreds of articles around the Internet already. I suggest you head to Google’s official introduction to Google Plus, or check out Read Write Web’s excellent coverage on it. What I am going to do here is to contrast Facebook with Google Plus and explain why professionals, especially communication professionals, should give Google Plus a good hard look. Taking into account that the service is still in its infancy, many of the points raised here are still theoretical, especially with most people still unfamiliar or without access to the service.

Google Plus is not just another social network. It approaches the concept from a different direction — one that can make it an excellent learning and communication tool, not just the “no time for breakfast today, but my cat looks happy, lol” kind of shout-out platform. The reason behind this difference is in content strategy, or content management. Google has placed the content control back in the hands of the user. With Google Plus, each one of us gets to wear the content strategist hat and have a go.

Think about it this way: Facebook has had privacy issues for years. We can even say it redefined the term. It’s every professional’s nightmare. People don’t think of what they want to say and to whom: It’s just a jungle out there, so why bother? The two easy options are to either have a professional Facebook persona or simply avoid it altogether. Some of us maintain more than one Facebook account for this reason, while others dig into the depths of the privacy settings and create lists of who can see what. Either way, it’s usually ineffective and challenging to do.

Even if you can manage one of the two systems, the constant changes to the service tend to annoyingly restore the privacy settings back to what Facebook believes should be the default — the “share everything, regret later” philosophy.

As a result, most people do not take Facebook seriously as a professional platform. My Facebook account is full of restrictions meant to block certain people from seeing those photos and posts I don’t want to show up during a job interview. I would probably never use my current Facebook account for professional networking or interests; it’s just not serious and not filtered enough for that purpose. The only thing Facebook is good for professionally is to add contacts in order to spy on them to find out more useful information. This is exactly why you should have as little information on Facebook as possible.

Google Plus is something else. When I want to share an interesting article, I go to “Sparks,” which is a different application altogether, and share an article of interest with people from my professional circle. This specific aspect of Google Plus still requires much work, but the potential is evident in the concept. I created my professional circle (“network”) as soon as I joined Google Plus. Adding people to this circle was natural and quick. Within seconds, I had an article shared with only the people who I know would care about it.

My friends, who are more interested to hear about my latest date, will get the content relevant to them. In other words, I have the responsibility of creating relevant information. I need to choose what information to give and to who, and not just block certain people form reading everything I can come up with. Through the ease of sharing this information, Google Plus does not just invite me to share relevant information, it compels me to create and find information, something Facebook has never done for me.

Yes, Facebook fans can argue that it’s possible to create lists and groups in Facebook just the same. However, the lists are not immediately available and have to be maintained. Facebook’s lists work as filters. Google Plus’s circles work as, well, circles. Just like in the real world.

But there’s more to Google Plus. It also ties in the rest of the services Google already offers in a nice tidy box, waiting for communication professionals to use. All you have to do is to click on the black bar at the top of the screen, and everything is at your fingertips: your documents, diagrams and sketches, conversations and logs, calendar with appointments, and contacts. The potential level of integration here is huge. Think of what happens when you can share not just a link to a Google Doc from within the Google Plus stream, but also have it show up with a short blurb or a summary of what’s in it, perhaps with a thumbnail. Have a wireframe image saved into your online album, and have different people comment and add to it, if needed.

I don’t know if the folks at Google thought of Google Plus as a professional social networking platform, but I see it as a serious competitor of LinkedIn and Twitter, not just Facebook.

Shay Shaked is a professional information visualist with strong background in non-profit organizations. Currently completing his Masters degree in Professional and Technical Communications, Shay has always been passionate about communication and teaching. He is working part time as a teacher and hopes to pursue academia and education in the near future. To view Shay’s blog, visit Technically Writing.

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Diverging Directions for Tech Comm: Social Media or Structured Authoring

Tom Johnson — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 06:35:14 +0000

Two powerful trends in tech comm seem to be moving in different directions: social media and structured authoring.

I have used a wiki as my primary format for documentation for the past year and a half. I tried to corral a group of volunteer technical writers to edit and update the wiki, because I embraced the idea that collective intelligence beats the individual thinker in the long run. But even the most advanced wikis don’t have a structured authoring backend. With wikis, you compromise single sourcing, content re-use, and multi-channel publishing. So you really can’t move in both directions well. I feel like I’ve had to choose whether I’ll pursue structured authoring or social media formats for my help content.

While at the STC Summit, I kept thinking about metadata and the idea of sorting content semantically by queries that leverage the metadata. I asked more than a dozen of the smartest people in tech comm about this, and I came to the conclusion that if I ever wanted to do it, I’d need to embrace an XML format and develop custom semantic tags.

One evening I had a dinner conversation with Sarah O’Keefe about moving to XML. Sarah explained different ways to write XML and how to query the XML even when it’s not structured as it should be. She grabbed a napkin and drew the following:

The code Sarah drew for me on a napkin.

Yes, I kept this napkin! It was the best souvenir from the STC Summit. It’s funny because when she asked for an example of one of the metadata values and properties I wanted to use, I said role as the value, with editor as the property. But I must have mumbled it, because she wrote “elder” as the property instead.

After the conference ended and I returned to work, I decided to abandon my wiki and move all my content into our Mark Logic database, which stores content in XML. This is LDS.org’s backend anyway. To do this, I would need to convert all my wiki topics into XML and add the appropriate metadata to run all the custom queries and provide the faceted filtering I wanted.

I spent several weeks coming up with the right metadata and applying it to all my topics. I was basically saying goodbye to Mediawiki and the idea of collaboration. I would structure my content in XML, and I would be the sole author. Not that many community volunteers edited the wiki anyway, but there was always the possibility that some day it might take off. Still, I had given the wiki almost 2 years without seeing fruit. It was time to try something else.

When it finally came down to the time when I needed to convert my content, I learned that the web development team had created special help templates for me. These templates included a WYSIWYG editor where I would basically create pages. Further, I wouldn’t even be the one converting the content. A special web development team would handle it all, populating the templates and creating pages, and even if I wanted to touch the content I could not. They planned to pull it directly from the wiki.

What about all of those metadata fields that I had labored over? I had to pitch the whole idea about semantic structure and findability again. In the end, they penciled in a future task in a later sprint to expose certain metadata fields in the templates for the web publishing team to use. The custom queries will be a future request, once my content is in XML.

I thought I would be swimming in XML and coding until my eyes turned blue, but it turns out that this approach is even less techie than the wiki. For the time being, I relinquished my publishing control.

I’m eager to see if the new format yields higher visibility and findability for the help. It probably won’t be until the end of summer when I can evaluate whether the migration from wiki to XML was a good idea.

In the meantime, I have not altogether abandoned the idea of collaboration. I’m a project lead for a community LDSTech project that is more community-sourced than my wiki ever was. I have more than a handful of writers creating and submitting articles.

But hoping someone will land on a help page, realize its a wiki, log in and make intelligent updates is a dream that only few groups have ever achieved (most visibly, Wikipedia). The promises and potential of structured authoring, with faceted filtering, semantic structures, and intelligent queries, seems to outweigh the attempt to collaborate efforts across large groups using wikis.

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Moving from Google Reader to Twitter Hashtags

Tom Johnson — Sat, 21 May 2011 06:17:23 +0000

On my smartphone, I used to have Google Reader as one of my four quicklinks on the bottom toolbar. I recently replaced it with Twitter Topic, an app that shows all tweets that meet a specific hashtag.

For example, if I’m interested in reading about other experiences at Confab, I’ll search for the #confab topic. If I’m interested in seeing what’s new about findability, I’ll search for the #findability topic. If I’m curious to know what people are saying about the supposed Judgment Day on May 21, I enter the hashtag #judgmentday.

This switch from RSS feeds to Twitter hashtags as a means of finding information marks an important shift for me. For some time now, RSS feeds have been failing. There is simply too much noise to make sifting through the 1,000+ new RSS items worth the while. With Twitter Topic, I usually find relevant content immediately.

The fundamental flaw in subscribing to an RSS feed is that one’s blog will focus on a specific area of interest and always deliver interesting content on that topic. In reality, people post about a lot of different topics, even in a narrowly defined niche. One day I may post about semantic structuring of wiki content, another day I may write about an experience at a conference, another day I might post about a WordPress tip, and another day I might tell you about my content curation strategy, and so on. Multiply that variety by 500 different RSS feeds, and you end up with a lot of content variety. Too much unfocused variety just comes across as noise.

Unless you enjoy reading miscellany, or unless your RSS subscriptions are limited just to people you know, RSS feeds will probably fail as you increase the number of subscriptions. While Twitter has a much higher noise ratio if you just look at unfiltered tweets of whomever you’re following, Twitter also has a higher potential to reduce the noise through hashtags. These hashtags are really metadata applied to content. It makes a huge difference in findability.

Today it’s more important than ever to tag your information with the right metadata if you want to be found. When you send your post titles across Twitter, add the necessary metadata (hashtags) so that people can find your content. Subscribing to a blog isn’t such a priority any more, because subscriptions only yield more and and more RSS glut.

RSS feeds aren’t a total throwaway, though. You can still highlight your feeds based on keywords. You can also apply smart filters using tools such as Yahoo Pipes to filter out content. The only difference is that one or two keywords may show a post as being relevant, when in fact the keywords are only minor tangents in the article, not the main focus. That’s why I like the Twitter hashtag: it’s often a stronger form of metadata.

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Collaborative Posts Q&A

Tom Johnson — Wed, 04 May 2011 14:06:06 +0000

Kristi Leach interviewed me for a quick Q&A about the occasional collaborative posts that I do on this site. You can read the interview on Kristi’s site, Why Tech Comm. Here’s an excerpt:

When I was deciding on a format for my workshop, Grassroots Documentation Testing, I thought of Tom Johnson’s collaborative posts on his blog, IdRatherBeWriting.com. In collaborative posts, Tom poses a question to his readers (who include many seasoned and successful technical communicators), and they respond with advice in the comments. Read the rest here.

Speaking of collaborative posts, does anyone have a question he or shewould like me to use as the next collaborative post?

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The Real Source of Findability

Tom Johnson — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 07:49:19 +0000

I was talking to a colleague today about wikis when he mentioned Google, and how Google has such a brilliantly simple solution that allows users to find content. With Google, there’s a search box. The users type keywords they want information about, and most of the time Google returns brilliantly relevant results.

While some credit is certainly due to Google’s Pagerank algorithm, what enables findability in Google is that there’s so much content on the web to find. If you have billions of web pages, of course the search engine is going to come up with results that match almost any keywords you enter. As a result, because of the mass of content, you have instant findability. Take away the content, leave only the algorithm, and you have nothing.

Above: You find information on Google because it draws upon a wide variety of content authors for the information. Below: A typical help file lacks information because usually only one person creates content for it.

How much of that content is Google generating itself? Almost none of it. The web is like a giant wiki, where anyone can author and publish content. Only instead of adding new wiki pages, we’re all adding our own sites and pages on our sites.

I brought this up as a colleague and I were discussing our organization’s external wiki, tech.lds.org. It’s a wiki that has quietly been growing in size each day, used for myriad purposes both internally and externally. You can do a search on quite a few topics and pull up content — because so many people are authoring. There are probably more than 20 regular authors contributing to that site, with probably 30+ daily edits. When you have so many authors producing content, the result is that someone is going to address a problem that another is searching for. The answers are findable.

The paradigm of a single author controlling all the content for a knowledge domain — keeping it in a tightly structured environment that moves through a strict editorial process — is a model that, no matter how well organized or planned out, will probably fail when it comes to findability precisely because you only have one person creating the content. That one person is inevitably trapped by his or her own experiences, by his or her limited domain and restricted viewpoint, by his or her job role and title. There’s no way a single person can produce the mass of content necessary to enable findability on a wide scale. The person will produce 100 single-focused pages compared to the 10,000 multi-faceted pages produced by an army of authors.

The intelligence of the web isn’t the technical infrastructure or the idea of bandwidth or CSS. Its intelligence comes because so many people contribute content. It’s the true global encyclopedia — Wikipedia is just one part of a larger body of reference information. We’re all contributing to it, page by page.

We’re only about 15 years into this endeavor. Imagine the size of the content repository in 50 years. We’re moving towards a book of knowledge that is growing daily, becoming more and more comprehensive — and it’s because of the individual contributions, not because of a specific authoring tool or process or technology.

It’s a free for all, sure, with any kind of design, format, and style. But despite the variances, people look past design and focus on content. This is why, when we consider enterprise authoring methodologies, what makes the most sense is the authoring methodology that empowers the most people to author.

As more people author, the pool of content grows wider and deeper. Soon you’ll amass enough information that, although it’s a content dumpyard in many cases, when users dig around they find the nuggets of information they’re looking for. It’s not a huge problem if the individual content on each page or project varies in layout, color, and style. The mere fact that the content is there, because you empowered a subject matter expert or user to author it, means that you have content. Content exists. This content gives rise to findability.

Although I have looked at many authoring tools, I think the one that triumps them all is the wiki, precisely because it enables the enterprise to author content. Many times the authoring is stifled and only a fraction of what it could be, but other times large numbers of contributors jump in and author. They produce loads of content. When this happens, the result is something far greater than any single authoring team alone can produce.

In short, findability isn’t enabled by some clever organizational technique such as tagging or faceted browsing or even schema theory. Findability is enabled by empowering all humans to share and publish their knowledge.

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Trends in Search Engine Optimization — Shifting from Search to Social?

Tom Johnson — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 03:35:13 +0000

In The Big Shift from Search to Social, Anne Gentle notes the growing problem with Google’s search and trends towards alternative search sources, such as social networks like Facebook. She links to an stirring NY Times article called The Dirty Little Secrets of Search, which I recommend reading.

The Dirty Little Secrets About Search, from the NYTimes

The NYTimes article exposes how search engines are gamed, and how search engines can also game consumers.

As the NYTimes article points out, the strategies for gaming search engines often involve buying links pointing to your site. I’ve encountered a bit of this myself. Last week a “reader” offered to write a “guest post” for me on Wikipedia’s credibility issue, and how Wikipedia manages this risk. The guest poster only requested that in exchange for the completely unique post, he be allowed to include a “personal link.” When I received the post, it turned out to contain a link to an online university site. I turned the article down, not only because it wasn’t relevant to my blog, but because I get at least one person a month pitching a guest post with a link to an online university.

I’ve had offers from other companies to run text ads in my blog. Several years ago I made about $1300 just adding text links to website companies on about 20 old posts. Recently the same person returned to pitch more text ads to an exam-answers site, which I turned down for obvious ethical reasons. But regardless of the site, running text ads isn’t a good practice — if Google finds out, they could penalize your Pagerank.

Pagerank is always a bit of a mystery, but ever since MindTouch came out with their 20 most influential bloggers, and showed Scott Abel’s The Content Wrangler with a Pagerank of 7, and my site with a Pagerank of 5, I started to worry about the effect of those text ads. I removed them (I think they expired anyway), and after several months my site’s Pagerank is now a 6. Part of Scott’s Pagerank is due to the longevity of his site, I believe. He’s been online probably longer than most any other technical communicator. Also, he does post excellent, in-depth content — rich with search engine keywords.

Although Anne notes that Facebook visits surpassed Google visits, I’m not sure if this is an apples versus oranges argument. Are people turning to Facebook and other social networks primarily to find information, or for social engagement? I occasionally search for keywords on search.twitter.com, especially if I’m looking for something occurring now. But as a general means of finding information, I almost never search social networks.

However, when I can’t find information, perhaps because the search engines are gamed with all kinds of J.C. Penney type schemes, then yes, turning to social networks is a good idea. For example, last Friday I googled how to create a screencast of an iPhone app, and not finding anything on Google, I turned to Twitter. But other than turning to social networks as a last resort, for me social networks primarily serve social purposes, and search engines primarily serve search purposes.

What does this all mean for technical writers? We keep hearing that technical writers have a goldmine of SEO-rich content, and that companies need to leverage the search engine results and financial benefits that will come from putting this content online in the realm of user search. SEO and web platforms should play a larger consideration in how we author help material — particularly if our audience is external. It’s usually more than enough, though, just worrying about accuracy, concision, and content approval. Now if you add good SEO practices to the mix, you have a lot going on in each topic.

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The Problem of Free and the Long Tail of Content Production

Tom Johnson — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 15:23:24 +0000

Internet users have grown accustomed to free content. But this is not without its problems. Jeff Chandler used to produce a Weekly WordPress podcast . His last podcast, “I tried,” is dated back in December. It’s a long, tired explanation about the difficulties of pouring so much energy into an endeavor that has no substantial financial return. As he moves toward marriage and maintains a full-time job, the amount of free time he can devote to essentially a profitless hobby shrinks even more. After more than 100 podcast episodes, it seems he’s starting to change his course.

It’s no surprise to me that the podcast would come to an end (at least the recent hiatus seems to portend an end). About a year ago, I remember speaking with a friend of mine who works at WordPress. I told him they should hire Jeff on their WordPress team, because his steam would eventually run out without a sustainable income, and this podcast channel, which had a lot of momentum, would slow. My friend explained that it’s not always necessary to incorporate everyone into full-time WordPress employment to ensure their services continue. Looking back, to some degree I was right.

Recently it seems that Automattic, the leaders of WordPress, too, is also feeling the squeeze of free. According to Chandler’s last podcast, with the closure of Windows Live services, hundreds of thousands of bloggers have been signing up at WordPress.com. WordPress.com increased from 400,000 users to 900,000 users per month.

I don’t know if it’s related, but recently I noticed that Automattic started clarifying their prices for Akismet, the plugin that helps block spam. It used to be that when you signed up for a WordPress.com username, you automatically saw an Akismet API key in your profile that you could plug into your blog. I missed this idea, but apparently Akismet was a service that I should have been paying monthly fees for since the beginning. In fact, since I have more than 25,000 page views a month (my site received 57,000 page views last month), I am supposed to pay $50 a month for the Akismet service.

The following image shows the pricing model. If your site receives more than 25,000 page views per month, you have to select an enterprise commercial license starting at $50 a month.

Akismet's newly clarified pricing structure shows that if you have more than 25,000 page views a month, you have to pay $50 a month for Akismet.

That seemed steep to me, so I deactivated Akismet and am now trying out Antispambee, which so far works quite well. I also closed all comments on posts older than 60 days. Ninety-nine percent of comments on old posts are spam anyway, so this just reduces the amount of possible spam.

While of course I dislike the sudden clarification of Akismet pricing, I have to wonder if WordPress itself isn’t feeling the squeeze of free services, somewhat like Jeff with his podcast. Automattic gives a lot of software away for free, making money mostly through add-on services such as custom domain names, access to the stylesheet, and storage space. Controlling spam is a must-do task on a blog, so this is a potential money maker if they can sell it as an add on. (Without a spam blocker, I would receive about 100 spam comments a day, which would essentially kill the open commenting policy on my site.)

I had a more regular podcast on my site last year as well. I will still occasionally post a podcast, but it became clear to me more than a year ago that podcasting wasn’t my future. Listeners are far fewer than blog readers, the time required to produce a podcast is much higher, and podcasters are constantly being threatened by big media’s move into the amateur’s space. Why listen to me drone on about technical writing when you have This American Life, Radiolab, The New Yorker Fiction podcast, and dozens more professional podcasts in your queue?

This brings me to a larger point. More and more free content producers are going to fade away. They’re going to realize that, for the effort they put into their sites, the return isn’t worth it. Regular, sustainable content produced on a daily basis will decline.

However, because more people will start blogs and podcasts, this decline in content from the free content producers will be balanced out by the general increase in collective content. Your RSS Reader will still be full of new feeds to check out, but rather than reading through your top 20 feeds in your blogroll, you’ll read through the top posts from over 200 blog feeds. This is the long tail of content production. Fewer bloggers and podcasters producers will push out regular content because they don’t see enough return. But since there will be more content producers overall, readers won’t notice a difference.

The long tail of content production: Even though the number of new content per source decreases, the overall increase in the number of sources leads to a greater amount of overall content.

In other words, never mind that Tom only publishes 1 podcast every 3 months. You can grab podcasts from 15 other sites that are even better. Those 15 other sites may only produce 1 podcast every 3 months as well. But collectively, your iPod is still full of new podcasts to listen to. You just have more variety and more sources that you’re pulling from. Content is still free, but the sources are more varied.

Will the paid content model ever work online for amateurs? Will the influencers eventually fade away into a sea of irregular content producers spread out globally? I think so. But I am not saddened by the fact that it’s harder and harder to make money online. I like the idea that a global conversation across countries and companies and contexts is taking place. When ideas come from a greater diversity of engaged people, the information is richer and deeper.

For me, the revenue I make from my blog through ads, WordPress consulting, and speaking engagements is minimal compared to the salary from my regular job. I never entertained the idea that my blog could somehow support me and my family. Also, if I somehow did find enough revenue (possible if you’re single, live in a shared room outside of town, have no debt or car, and eat only Top Ramen noodles), I would run out of fodder for my blog without a job to keep me challenged. I would slip away from my immersion in the technical writer’s world. This world keeps me engaged and provides me with topics to blog about.

If all revenues cease from my blog, I would still find a lot of value in it, because it keeps me professionally engaged. This is why if you’re starting a blog, it’s probably best to let it accompany your career choice. With this strategy, your blog efforts always provide an indirect financial return on career growth. This indirect financial return can be an incentive that helps you keep blogging even when there seems to be little tangible reward.

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Participatory Economics: Are Companies Budgeting for Social Media?

Tom Johnson — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 16:15:50 +0000

A podcast summary by David Armano from Edelman caught my attention yesterday. Armano writes:

My theory is that social technologies and the online behaviors they enable leads to more participation from what use to be static audiences and “consumers”. But as a result of this, a demand is generated for participation to be reciprocated from business and brands. If this is true (and I think the needle is moving in that direction) does big business have the supply to meet the demand of participation? (Logic+Emotion: Participatory Economics: The Supply + Demand of Participation.)

In other words, businesses may step into social media to align with web trends. After all, if you don’t have a blog, a Facebook presence, a Twitter account, a forum, and other social media tools, you’re behind the times. But just having a Facebook page or a WordPress blog URL or Twitter ID doesn’t ensure that you also have presence and participation. Participating in social media requires a resource effort that many businesses haven’t budgeted for.

This post rang true because last week I scrambled to keep up with forum posts and other feedback from users after the release of a calendar application. In our release, we included a Submit Feedback link to gather the feedback. Similarly, we have a forum where more tech-savvy users post and exchange information. In the past two weeks, we’ve had about 425 emails and 40 forum responses.

I’m not sure who’s supposed to respond to all this feedback, because no one factored it into the project plan. Users grow frustrated when no one responds to them, but to respond to the barrage of feedback would require a full-time job. I sometimes scan the feedback for topics to add to the help, but we need someone hired as a social media/support specialist to respond individually to their questions and feedback.

I don’t think dedicating full time resources to social media is on anyone’s mind. Most businesses don’t understand the time required to engage in social media. In the past, perhaps users didn’t expect it. But now, if users submit feedback to a business, or post in a forum about a company’s product, they expect a response.

Ideally, businesses will hire a new force of employees to engage and interact in social media. But in my world, social media is a layer of optional participation on top of your regular job. I’m not even talking about raw content creation for social media channels, such as writing blog posts. I’m just referring to responses and basic participation in forums and threads.

The unfortunate reality is that because businesses aren’t immersed in social media channels, they probably won’t even realize the need.

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Do community efforts work?

Tom Johnson — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 15:32:11 +0000

Some of my projects include community-involved documentation. When you work for a church, it’s not hard to find dedicated members willing and committed to sacrificing a few hours for a higher cause. To harness community efforts, I gathered up a large pool of volunteer names and formed a listserv. I communicated project needs with the listserv members and asked for help.

Despite some contributions, the majority of volunteers are hindered by too many obstacles — access to information, time, standards, and more — to contribute much. As such, I’ve begun to change my expectations from content creation to content review and feedback.

Access to Information

The community volunteer, as an outsider, faces difficulties accessing the right people and information. As a volunteer, you may not know the project manager, the quality assurance lead, the developers, and other contacts that have information you need. Without access to the right information sources, documentation efforts are vain.

If you do have contact information, you may be contributing only in your spare time, outside of regular working hours. So you’ll be left with email and voicemail exchanges, if you’re bold enough to even make contact. If you’ve ever tried to get information when no one is in the office, you know how frustrating that can be.

Trust also becomes an issue, because many times project information is sensitive or still in deliberation. Project managers may be hesitant to disclose the full facts to an outsider they don’t know, whom they’ve never met or worked with.

Time and Sequentiality

Another problem is time. Many volunteers have full-time jobs, families, and little time. The idea with volunteer work is to harness the long tail: if 100 volunteers each contribute two hours in a day, that’s more than a month of labor of one full-time employee. The problem is, tasks often cannot be chunked into two hour increments that can be done independent of a specific sequence.

Think about designing and creating a quick reference guide, or configuring an online help. The tasks can’t be broken down into two-hour chunks that can be created by different people at different times. Many times tasks are sequential — they build on one another. You must first gather the information, then organize it, then illustrate it, then lay it out, then review it, then test it, then publish it, and and so on. The whole work may take 200 hours to complete, but each phase builds on the previous one, more or less, so distributing the entire work to the community would require that you spread out the work in phases. This kind of coordination is tough and complicates volunteer efforts.

Style and Standards

Another problem with community contributions deals with style and standards. I’m a picky writer, and anything the community produces will be perceived as coming from my group, or me. If a deliverable doesn’t match my standards, style, or preference, I’m less inclined to support it. When a volunteer submits what I feel are sub- or non-standard deliverables or content, I face an uncomfortable situation that I’m not sure how to handle tactically — offend the volunteer by refusing the work, accept the work and lower confidence in my team, or spend time reworking the deliverable to my satisfaction, which may require more work than creating it from scratch.

It’s impractical to expect volunteers to be familiar with the intricacies of our department’s style, to know my own preferences for formats, etc. I might as well expect a writer from another company to magically match the style and approach of our own.

Management Time

In working with community, you also have to consider time for volunteer management. Expect to spend about 25 percent of your time communicating, responding, and managing community member questions and tasks. This is somewhat of a risk, because you assume that the results from the community will surpass what you could have done yourself in that 25 percent of time. Management may not be something you can bill towards, especially if you aren’t already a manager.

Further, management is complicated by the remote distance. You’re managing people you’ve never met, working with them without any idea of their background, or without understanding their expectations and motivations. You could be managing your neighbor, or someone in an island in the Pacific, or a retired army colonel — all with little understanding of their background.

Success with Reviews and Feedback

Where community efforts have succeeded for me is with reviews and feedback. At times, when I finish a page of documentation and publish it to the wiki, I often send out an announcement to the community listserv asking for their review. Their comments sometimes triple the depth of the original article. Community members pose tough questions, present perspectives I hadn’t considered, note situations I hadn’t thought about, and generally scrutinize the information available.

Having a sounding board of 65 intelligent people is not something to underestimate. Sometimes I’ll just throw an idea out to them to get their thoughts. Other times their non-response tells me information too — for example, that something is not an issue for people.

On the left, the content is already written; on the right, the page is blank. It's a lot easier for volunteers to provide feedback than to create raw content.

Although community members may be reviewing a specific collection of pages, it’s rare that they make edits directly. More often they send a response with some suggestions and questions, and prefer that I make the edits. I prefer this method too.

Super Volunteer

So far I’ve been speaking generally about my experience with typical community volunteers. But for every 100 volunteers, there are a few who are golden contributors. Their efforts far exceed the efforts of normal volunteers. They go above and beyond the call of duty with a feeling of personal ownership and dedication. I don’t exactly know what motivates these super volunteers, but I love them.

Last week we were facing a tough decision about where to publish information to avoid duplication, so I consulted with a super volunteer. His response was thorough and insightful. Not only did he provide a sound reason to help me make a decision, he also pointed out a problem with terminology that I hadn’t considered. I ended up reworking and re-organizing the content.

This example reinforces the best benefit I’ve received from community efforts: feedback and insight. Rather than inviting community volunteers to make direct edits and create raw content (and then get frustrated when they don’t participate), I’m now more inclined to invite them to provide feedback and insight, to review and comment. I ask how they would handle a situation. I ask if a specific page I wrote seems clear. I ask if a topic covers all the issues they face with a task.

With an expectation of feedback and review, rather than raw content creation, I’ve had a lot more success with community efforts. Trends with minimal participation fall away, and the sound of the community voice increases.

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Paper.li as an Alternative to Google Reader [Screencast]

Tom Johnson — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 14:40:20 +0000

To find good content online, I find that I’m going less and less to Google Reader and more to sources like Paper.li, an automated content curation tool that filters out some of the content noise. The problem with Google Reader is lack of content curation. You get a ton of noise, regardless of how fine-tuned your list of feeds are. With tools such as paper.li, which rank the most shared links on Twitter (based on a user’s followers, a hashtag, or a list), you can filter out the first layer of noise and more quickly find relevant content.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwXeWqaFP9A