STC senior member Anne Gentle is a technical writer, blogger, and author of the book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. A technical writer for over ten years, Anne currently works as a senior technical writer at Advanced Solutions International, which provides management software for professional and social organizations such as the Society for Technical Communication. She writes about social media; structured authoring; and XML models for technical documentation, such as DITA, blogging, wikis, collaborative documentation, online user assistance, and writing in an Agile development environment, on her blog at JustWriteClick.com. She also volunteers as a documentation maintainer for FLOSS Manuals, working on manuals for One Laptop per Child and SugarLabs, open-source projects dedicated to bringing kid-focused laptops to developing countries and an education platform to the world. STC is pleased to partner with Gentle in offering an online seminar on collaboration.
Is your work group not producing the work on time or at the level of quality needed? Is the collaboration breaking down? Groups can take action even quicker than before thanks to tools that amplify group communications, such as wikis, blogs, forums, social networks, and instant messaging. There are distinct levels of collaboration that a group can attain and what they accomplish directly correlates to the level of collaboration. STC’s web seminar on Climbing the Levels of Collaboration: How to Harness the Power of Crowds, Thursday, 10 September from 1:00–2:30 PM EDT (GMT-4) can help you improve the performance and productivity of your work group.
- Information sharing—Finding information as any technical writer does, via email, phone calls, interviews, and so on. A brief collaboration exercise shows the power of information sharing.
- Cooperating—A discussion of Agile development techniques to help shape a web application and the online help that accompanies it. Introduces the use of wikis for documentation.
- Collaborating—A case study of how a new in-person collaboration method called a Book Sprint is run (subject matter experts are identified and working together to create an information deliverable is covered). FLOSS Manuals’ wiki platform serves as an example.