Hillary Hart | Immediate Past President
The field of technical communication has long needed a body of knowledge (BOK) in order to be recognized as a profession. If we define a body of knowledge as “a term used to represent the complete set of concepts, terms and activities that make up a professional domain, as defined by the relevant professional association,” (Wikipedia), then STC is the obvious choice to develop the Technical Communication BOK (TCBOK). As the oldest professional association for technical communication, STC took up the challenge six years ago by instituting a strategic goal to “define the profession of technical communication” by “establish[ing] a body of knowledge for the profession” (www.stc.org/about-stc/the-society/strategic-goals). A team of stalwart industry and academic practitioners created a wiki on which to capture existing and original content that would define the practice of technical communication (http://stcbok.editme.com/).
This past year, a team of STC members and staff has been redeveloping the existing TCBOK. The new team is reinvigorating its design, content, and delivery; filling in gaps in content; and integrating the development site with the STC website. A portion of the new beta version will be unveiled at the 2013 Summit in Atlanta, GA. In this article, I would like to describe the process of updating the BOK and how the team developed the new prototype by considering these elemental features:
- Information development and content management
- Community and social engagement
- Editing strategies, integration of publications, intellectual property issues
These categories have evolved into three teams, each with a leader (Craig Baehr, Joel Kline, and Liz Pohland), and an overall facilitator, Hillary Hart. Once the team leads started meeting, in late June 2012, it became apparent that the first task was to update the value proposition developed by the original BOK team. Here is the new version, which stresses “positive user experience” as the unique contribution of technical communicators.
Technical communicators clarify the complex for a wide variety of organizations, fields, and industries. Through expert development, management, and dissemination of information, technical communicators help increase corporate revenue, customer satisfaction, and public safety, while reducing product development time, technical support, and other direct and indirect costs. Using a wide variety of technologies, tools, and processes, technical communicators deliver a positive user experience and the right information to people, when they need it and how they need it.
We are hopeful that the STC Board will adopt this new version.
The next stage in our project management was to formulate the goals for each category of activity. As often happens, the team’s alignment on precise goals took some time, but experience has taught me that the time is very well spent at the beginning of a project (or project stage) and avoids potentially catastrophic problems later. Here are the goals we are still working toward:
Information Development and Content Management Goals
- Restructure and reorganize content assets, including navigation tools, information modeling, information typing, content units, and metadata.
- Maximize usability and accessibility of the existing content so it functions more effectively as a hybrid information resource, as a portal of knowledge with a collaborative authoring component.
Community and Social Engagement Goals
- Foster community social engagement to facilitate contribution to the BOK and to support the BOK as a collaborative enterprise.
- Stimulate contribution and participation through social learning.
- Balance the needs and dialogue of academic and industry practitioners.
- Help to brand the TCBOK through social engagement and learning.
Editing Strategies, Integration of Publications, and Intellectual Property Issues Goals
- Define publications and content broadly, including books, periodicals, videos, podcasts, webinars, conference sessions, online courses and certificates, and other multimedia materials. Assess existing publications and content assets (from STC and elsewhere) for inclusion in the TCBOK model.
- Find editors to review content based on publication standards and style.
- Define STC content that will be used to populate the TCBOK.
- Evaluate and make recommendations about copyright and intellectual property.
- Find financial support for the BOK.
By mid-July, we were able to define specific tasks and place them along a timeline. To build a community and social engagement space, Joel Kline reviewed academic and industry preferences for TCBOK engagement and contribution, reviewed available social engagement tools, and selected a platform to integrate with the BOK. The current choice is LinkedIn, and the TCBOK group provided opportunities for volunteers and team members to negotiate the definition of structure and design.
To achieve our content-strategy goals, Craig Baehr analyzed the then-current wiki as an information model and, after conducting benchmarking research to determine the effectiveness of other models used in technical communication information portals and resources, he conducted a survey of sample users (mostly volunteers who had worked on the BOK in the past) to determine patterns and mental models used in portal searches, and specifically in the TCBOK.
For the rest of 2012, Craig inventoried content assets within the existing TCBOK and collected feedback from his team on their preferences for a collaborative authoring space within the existing BOK. Using this information, he created a subject index and also worked with Joel to produce a set of Content Submission Guidelines. Once the TCBOK 2.0 is online, Joel will develop a user contribution process to reconcile existing guidelines for submission, editing, and posting with a community approach to collaborative posting.
Meanwhile, Liz Pohland has been accumulating an inventory of all STC content assets and searching for BOK editors. As many as three editors were thought to be needed: an acquisitions editor, a content editor, and a wiki site manager. Her initial bad luck in finding an interested volunteer changed in late February with the addition of Deanne Levander to her team as general editor. Liz is working on an updated copyright agreement for contributors and on reviewing and tagging STC-related content assets, and will need to build a team of volunteer experts to review, select, and tag content for inclusion. Liz also has the important role of ensuring that TCBOK content aligns strategically with the efforts of the STC Certification Commission, as well as researching other TC-related content assets—other journals, books, knowledge centers (e.g., the tc.eserver)—that we might partner and share content with.
And finally, the whole team must determine content access options (as outlined in the original TCBOK Project Charter): What content will be free to everyone, free to members but at a cost to nonmembers, and at a cost to everyone (for example, third-party for-pay content).
Currently, much of the content in the BOK is being developed by students and their faculty and mentors. Pam Brewer and Stephen Bernhardt, among others, are guiding their students in assigned projects to add content to an empty topic page or to write additional content for existing pages. We must also build a team of volunteers/experts to tag and migrate existing wiki content into the new BOK site on the STC website. STC Webmaster Kobla Fiagbedzi is building the site as this article goes to press.
Once the prototype is built on this new wiki hosted by STC, the team leads are prepared to test and solicit feedback on the revised information model with new content categories and proposed navigation tools. Then we can work with other BOK team members to restructure and edit content to fit the new model and tools. To increase social engagement and ensure that the BOK continues to be collaboratively produced, we must find volunteer leaders who will liaise to other STC and TC communities. We also want to reconcile formal TCBOK knowledge with expert opinion and advice, as well as to develop a rating system that uses the community to score the value of TCBOK information.
And we are seeking ways to provide visibility and recognition to community members and contributors, both on the BOK site and through STC publications. We will be delighted to achieve our goal to deliver a working TCBOK prototype with a social component by the 2013 Summit in Atlanta, but in the end, it is the many volunteers we must celebrate—all those TC academic and industry practitioners who have been building this knowledge portal over the past six and a half years.
If you are interested in contributing to the TCBOK, please contact me at hart@mail.utexas.edu.
Committee Members
Dr. Craig Baehr is associate professor of technical communication and rhetoric at Texas Tech University. He is author two books and several articles on Web development and online publishing. He is an Associate Fellow, the STC Academic SIG program director, and faculty sponsor for the STC Texas Tech University Chapter. Previously, he worked as a technical writer and trainer for 10 years for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Dr. Hillary Hart is a Fellow of STC and currently serves as the Immediate Past President of the Society. A distinguished senior lecturer in the department of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, Hillary has published one book (sole author) and over 20 technical articles on environmental risk communication, engineering ethics, engineering communication, and defining technical communication.
Dr. Joel A. Kline is an associate professor in the department of digital communications at Lebanon Valley College. He teaches, researches, and consults in the areas of knowledge management, e-commerce, and digital strategy. Kline is the treasurer for the International Digital Media Arts Association and accredited in PR by the Public Relations Society of America.
Liz Pohland is the editor of Intercom and the director of publications and content strategy for STC. She is currently a PhD student in the Texas Tech technical communication and rhetoric program, studying new media and digital humanities efforts in museums and cultural heritage centers.
