9/9/2009

Climbing the Levels of Collaboration

Or, How to Harness the Power of Crowds (or your Coworkers) Anne Gentle STC Webinar, September 2009 My Story Senior technical writer at ASI Blogger at Just Write Click Started researching at BMC Software Working on the FLOSS Manuals and community

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Information Sharing Cooperating Co‐location, email, IM, interviewing Agile development practices : iterations involve retrospectives –what went well? What would you change? The classics of collaboration. Follow the rules. Be on time. Be Crowdsourcing professional. Share. Computer supported (social web enabled)

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What’s a wiki? Wiki growth Created in 1995 Enables simultaneous edits Makes web pages quickly Give customer a voice and view point Cross‐platform, cross‐browser Living, breathing, changing documentation

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Collaboration benefits Wiki matching Encourage crowdsourcing Return on investment by reducing customer support calls Scalability goes up and up Sometimes a customer forum isn't enough Online identity Open source products often use wikis

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What a wiki can’t do Motivating community contributions Don’t go on wiki suicide missions (Wiki for Dummies) Reputation Reciprocity Don’t put off collaborating with wiki engine research Attachment Efficiency

Reputation Reciprocity Will your customers appear expert in your product if they contribute What will customers receive in return? to your wiki? Can you borrow a point system? This type of motivation is especially important to consultants. BMC Developer Network example: points can be traded in for t‐shirts Make their contributions shine so that they will return with more scenarios.

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http://isnwiki.jot.com/WikiHome/Articles/111111431

Attachment, belonging Increased sense of efficacy How will customers feel part of your team or part of your support How will customers save time or money by contributing to your team, if that motivates him or her? wiki? Association with a cause - wiki.laptop.org. Consider a knowledgeable expert who feels she answers the same question via email over and over again.

Test yourselves – Which motivation is in play? 1. I like to see which online forums have the quickest response times to questions. 2. I help out on the message boards because I know I’ll have a question that I won’t be able to answer, and I will get help when I need it. 3. When I was new t o thi s t ech nol ogy or t ool , someone helped me, so I want to help others who are just starting out.

4. I’d like to switch careers so I make sure my online Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/canoafurada answers are sharp and quick. 5. To promote and grow my consulting business, I’m Do you have to use a wiki? First: listen. Then: participate, join a community learning more troubleshooting techniques by helping out Adaptations on a theme ‐ comments, wikislices, internal wikis with the scenarios that people bring to the community. Online forums Feedback loops to your source files

FLOSS Manuals wiki Book Sprint Why did you choose a wiki? FLOSS Manuals wiki and community What type of wiki are you using? OLPC and Sugar Labs How are you using the wiki? What changes have you seen as a result of using the wiki? and more

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Wiki Patterns Nov08: Mar09: Apr09: July08: Internet Firefox, PureData, • Stewart Mader's website , Censorship, DocTrain West, NYC & and book of the same Paris upstate NY Palm Springs CA Berlin name are extremely helpful for spurring wiki adoption. Aug08: Feb09: Mar09: May09: OLPC, Digital Command Line, CiviCRM, • PttPatterns dibdescribe a Austin TX Foundations, FSF Annual Mtg, Truckee certain solution to a NYC (Boston) CA problem in a context. • To avoid problems, you want to follow a model FLOSS Manuals Book Sprints pattern or be on the Many lessons learned along the journey. lookout for anti‐patterns. See http://en.flossmanuals.net/booksprints for a manual.

Best Practices Resources

• Establish a working draft area and a “published” area • Wiki tools research at (or wiki) wikimatrix.org • Write a wiki style guide • Wikipatterns website for • Give training on the wiki and a sandbox area adoption and people patterns • Maintain rules for arbitration • Meatball wiki • Offer original content, update content • Anne Gentle’s podcasts on TechWriterVoices.com • Beware of spammers, and back up often • ffeathers..com ‐ • Join the community, be a genuine contributor technical writer at Confluence • Recruit reviewers • JustWriteClick.com –wiki • Maintain categories category • Watch recent changes • FLOSS Manuals at • Expect small percentages of contributors and value flossmanuals.net them highly (90-9-1)

Discussion

• Questions?

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