Recorded Web Seminars

With the power and flexibility of the DITA standard comes many, many elements and attributes. Knowing which elements and attributes to use and in what situation can be confusing for new and experienced authors of DITA content. Join Patrick Quinlan from ditanauts.org as he provides an overview of constraints, demonstrates a freely available constraint plugin, and shows how to make changes to suit your organization.

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.

Are you thinking about implementing a content strategy but not sure how to define it? Concerned about switching to new and unfamiliar (and possibly expensive) authoring tools? Worried about workflow changes and operational disruption? Staff turnover? This webinar looks at small steps that you can take to get started with a content strategy before spending money on new tools or adopting new methodologies.

High Reliability Organizations (HROs) are organizations that are able to perform at maximum capacity in situations and environments where there is extreme potential for error and disaster. Examples of HROs are the fire service, the police, the military, hospital emergency rooms, and air traffic control systems. This webinar explores a business model extracted from existing HROs. This model is driven by setting expectations, communicating those expectations, setting up systems that support the work of contributing individuals, and fostering a culture of mindful decision-making and critical thinking.

Technical communication may be on the brink of a cultural shift from one-sided, didactic, expert-driven user documentation to utilizing user-generated content, collaborative communication, and the power of communities. Documentation teams can now utilize Web 2.0 approaches to capture user-generated content using user communities, wikis, blogs, forums, and other social media and to capture user information using social platforms APIs. To execute a successful social documentation strategy, documentation teams need to learn to architect and foster user communities and then to incorporate user-generated content into their workflows