Engaging your readers in the documentation

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Sarah Maddox
Technical writer

Conversation, the social web, community - they're all the buzz. But how do you get your readers involved in the documentation?

We've been experimenting.

This year started with a "Doc Sprint" where a group of people got together to write tutorials. Our focus was plugin and gadget development, so we invited the developers too. In other experiments, we use Twitter's hash tags, viral tendencies and 140-character limitation to their best advantage.

We tweet our release notes. In one of our long procedural documents, readers can tweet when they hit each milestone and can follow the tweets to see how others are faring. Our "Tips of the Trade" pages link to external blog posts where our readers share their own hard-won tips and techniques.

More formally, we have a contributor's licence agreement allowing outsiders to update the documentation.

How's it going and what have we learned? I'll show you in this session.

About Sarah

Sarah has worked as a technical writer for over ten years at various companies and using a variety of tools.

She is currently one of five technical writers at Atlassian, the company that develops and sells Confluence (the enterprise wiki).

Sara is now a wiki enthusiast, and is well acquainted with the challenges of using a wiki for technical documentation.

You can read some of Sarah's experiences on her blog 'ffeathers' at http://ffeathers.wordpress.com.

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