By Deanne Levander | Fellow
What Is a Body of Knowledge?
A body of knowledge is an accepted component of a profession. For example, a medical body of knowledge includes a repository of industry knowledge, a guide to practice management, an assessment of competency, and a learning tool (for example, device training by industry representatives). The Technical Communication Body of Knowledge (TCBOK) contains content that supports the technical communication discipline, which covers the broad range of material represented by the industries in which technical communicators practice their craft.
A Brief History of the TCBOK
The original TCBOK began as a brainstorming effort at the 2008 Summit in Philadelphia. The next year, the first phase of the BOK was unveiled at the 2009 Summit in Atlanta. The effort to start the project (as it was known) was enormous. It is fitting that a new, improved TCBOK strikes at the 2023 Summit, also in Atlanta.
Many STC members have participated in the development of TCBOK content and the TCBOK iterations. Without this volunteer participation, there would be no TCBOK. STC leaders from industry and academia have steered the body of knowledge through three different platforms. The first platform was a wiki-based platform, which allowed anyone’s content to be added under pre-set content areas. The second platform was a WordPress® platform that included a wiki plug-in. The current platform is a WordPress® website. Many STC volunteers have contributed content and participated as editors and platform managers. The WordPress® platforms allowed back-end access to edit and manipulate content based on volunteer-developed standards and style.
Among the earliest contributions were the TCBOK personas. At the time they were added to the TCBOK, the personas included age, marital status, and other characteristics that are not particularly relevant to the role they play as current TCBOK users. To maintain relevancy, personas should be updated (for example, to keep up with technology, terminology, or demographics). An article from the Nielsen-Norman Group (leaders in research-based user experience) outline how and why to update personas to maintain relevancy.
What, then, should the TCBOK contain? After a lot of discussion and much debate, the TCBOK committee and team agreed to pull in STC content from Intercom, Technical Communication journal, and other STC publications. In the past year, the TCBOK team began combing through Intercom articles that fit the main and subordinate topics. The team created a new site map and the TCBOK began its third iteration as a website.
The TCBOK Today
The current TCBOK team works to connect existing content to new topics, subtopics, and headings within the existing content framework. During the past year, the team has met on a number of Saturday mornings to identify relevant content for each topic and put it where it belongs. During these working meetings, new topics have been discovered and existing topics and subtopics were moved or otherwise altered. An additional challenge for the TCBOK team is to determine how to adjust the style sheets following a recent theme change. Theme changes can wreak havoc on sites that have custom styles set up, and the TCBOK has undergone a number of platform and theme changes, which have stopped the TCBOK editors a number of times. However, regardless of the technological challenges, the editorial team continues to link existing content and find new content.
The TCBOK has a been a long-term project of the Society for Technical Communication. It has been in-process for at least 20 years, having moved from a wiki-based platform to the current website platform. During those 20 years, many changes have occurred in both content and format. What you see online now is the most current version, although the format needs more tweaking.
Because the TCBOK is managed by volunteers, progress can be slow depending on volunteer workloads. For example, when I was a freelance technical writer, I had far more free time to devote to the TCBOK. As with any volunteer work, the rate at which changes can occur ebbs and flows, based on individual contributors and project needs.
As an example, one of the TCBOK editors recently developed a navigation aid, which will be added to the current TCBOK. In addition, another editor kicked off a site map that is governing where content should be placed. It informs the editors what and where content belongs. The exciting part about being on the TCBOK team is seeing the constant state of change that brings the site closer to a useful tool that will serve technical communicators in various stages of their professional life.
Previous editors contributed editing skills as well as a robust style and standards guide and the basis for contributing content. Anyone joining the TCBOK editor team will have access to the TCBOK styles and standards, which are based on STC’s standards. We defer to the Chicago Manual of Style and the American Heritage Dictionary.
Take a moment today to visit tcbok.org. Click through the main and subordinate tabs to get a feel for its organization. Remember, not all content has been linked, but the categories represented by the tabs may encourage you to submit an article.
Content Heuristics
We use a set of heuristics to guide our content acceptance. Content must meet three out of the five points. These rules of thumb also guide our reviews, when we determine what content can be updated or what content should be removed.
- It is timely or contributes to STC’s history.
- It is relevant to the discipline of technical communication.
- It provides value to practitioners (for example, advances their knowledge) and academics (for example, it can contribute to a syllabus for a course in technical communication).
- It is original and not redundant TCBOK content.
- It aligns with one or more of the nine core competencies of professional certification.
Most content can be weighed against this list with clear results. It either meets the criteria or it does not. This has been very helpful to the TCBOK editing team. Early contributions included student papers and practitioner pieces: each of these contributions may or may not be relevant now. The TCBOK team determines the relevance of all existing content as they move through each topic.
Where the TCBOK Is Headed Next
The TCBOK committee creates goals each year, adding them to the TCBOK Committee charter. The goals for the TCBOK are remarkably consistent from year to year. This STC tool contains a vast library of content that needs annual review against the heuristics. We are currently identifying articles in Intercom that support the tabs. Each TCBOK editor concentrates on one tab, adding relevant articles from Intercom in addition to editing content that currently exists. Eventually, relevant content from the Technical Communication journal will be incorporated into the TCBOK. Adding content that supports the STC certification program is another TCBOK committee goal.
References
Salazar, Kim. “Are Your Personas Outdated? Know When It’s Right to Revise.” February 14, 2016.
Deanne Levander is an STC Fellow, past Society and chapter leader, longtime TCBOK and STC volunteer. She works for an international biomedical manufacturing company and lives in St. Paul, MN.
