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Free Doc Train Ticket ($899) for Your Response to a Question About Innovation
In May I’ll be participating on a Documentation and Training West panel in a session called Meet the Bloggers. As a presenter, Scott Abel has given me a free guest ticket to the conference to give to one of my friends. I’ve decided to give the ticket away to one of my readers by way of a little contest. (In case you’re wondering, Scott gave me permission to do this.)
To enter the contest, just leave a reply to the contest question below either in the comments field or in a post on your site that links back to this post (make sure the trackback appears in the comments area — if it doesn’t, add a comment that has a link to your post).
Here is the contest question:
What’s the most innovative thing you’ve done, or the most innovative thing you want to do, in the field of technical communication?
Given that the theme of the conference is Web 2.0 and Its Impact on Technical Communication, innovative practices should be a nice fit (but your innovation doesn’t have to be Web 2.0-related). The deadline for the contest is Monday, Feb 18.
Please note that the ticket provides entrance to the conference only, and does not pay for hotel, travel, or meals. The conference takes place May 6 through 9 in Vancouver, B.C. (And if you win the ticket, you don’t have to “hang out” with me or anything.)
I’ll pick the winner using an objective Random Number Generator (rather than trying to determine the best answer).
Note: Even if you’re not interested in attending said conference, please let me know your innovative thoughts anyway. Also, if you aren’t subscribed to The Content Wrangler (Scott’s blog), check it out.
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Tags: Doc Train
February 14th, 2008 at 8:42 am
I work as a programmer writer (I write about code). One of the biggest problems that we faced when I started was that we never knew what the developers were adding or removing from the build, or when. In fact, very few of the developers actually knew what was happening to the build.
I worked with another writer/developer to create a software application that would:
- introspectively look at each DLL in a build to analyze what was ‘in it’. (Very much like what Reflector does)
- store this information in a database
- compare the information against previous builds
This allowed us to compare version to version what we had in any given build. Once we finished that, we realized that in the database was 90% of the content that appears in API documentation. (Name of a member, its return type, parameters, etc). So, we added:
- the ability to associate documentation written in XML with every member in the database.
- the ability to publish API documentation from the database in several formats.
Adding this did the following:
- sped up our production process for API docs (previously in frame or word) from hours to minutes
- reduced the number of translatable words in that doc set by 90%, without reducing the content of the output
- substantially reduced the time to author content (I have to write 90% less material, even though most of that was boilerplate)
- allowed us to single source content for similar projects
- allowed us to produce other formats (such as intellisense) in english and 8 other languages for essentially no cost
February 15th, 2008 at 7:46 am
The most innovative thing I have done recently was to multi-target the context-sensitive help (CSH) content of a Windows application to CHM (1 MB with all images removed)and WebHelp (30+ MB with all images in place) and integrate hyperlinks to MP3 “audiobytes” (2-3 minute audio segments explaining a procedure or concept), WMV streaming video (2-8 minute how-to videos), and supplemental documentation (white papers, marked-up images describing process flow, etc.). The CHM linked to the same portal-based content as the WebHelp but allowed the deployment to as small as possible. Every CHM topic linked to its WebHelp equivalent, allowing the user to see the missing images with bulleted hotspots and descriptions. The variety of content mediums allowed for various granularities of detail and aided the users (all of whom were new to the product because it was new in its industry) in learning the material as quickly as their preferred learning style (visual, auditory, or kinesthetic) allowed. Fun stuff.
February 17th, 2008 at 8:57 am
The most innovative thing I have done is successfully integrate automated documentation into the Help v2 .NET programming environment topics.
February 19th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
I drew a random number (see http://idratherbewriting.com/jing/contest.swf).
The winner is 1. That corresponds to Dave.
Dave, do you want the ticket to Doc Train?
February 20th, 2008 at 1:40 am
Definitely!
Drop me an email to sync up on the exchange.
March 1st, 2008 at 4:51 pm
March 9th, 2008 at 5:52 pm