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:

• PDF version
• PowerPoint version