Technical Document Re-working Group/Technical Communication Outreach and Events

This page is a place to document a variety of technical communication outreach projects and events members of the Technical Document Re-Working Group have participated in.

Technical Communication Collaboration, Spring 2018: BSU & Cloud Services Technical Documentation Audit and Recommendations
Academic Institution: Boise State University (BSU)

Program: Technical Writing Graduate Program

Course Title: ENGL 537 WRITING FOR SOCIAL MEDIA AND ONLINE COMMUNITIES

Course Description: Apply interactive Internet-based technologies to easily collaborate, share, link and generate content. Analyzing user-created content and online communities, students will learn techniques and best practices for using the social web to enhance workplace communication using tools such as blogs, micro-blogs, wikis, social networking sites, tag clouds, and syndication.

Course Design: 8 grad students met once a week. Jan. 9 - April 30. Students engaged in several writing projects. The project with Wikimedia spanned 4–6 weeks

Desired Outcomes: Professor wanted students to better understand how individuals collaborate socially to perform technical writing tasks in Online communities.

Final Outcomes:


 * Students had a six week project. They reviewed the technical documentation posted on WikiTech, specifically Toolforge
 * From the beginning we wanted the students to use the same tools that professional Technical Communication folks would use when collaborating. We used a combination of Google Docs, Online class meetings and email to communicate and clarify.
 * Students were encouraged to use Wikimedia IRC Channels, discussion pages on wiki and mailing lists to ask general questions of staff and volunteers.
 * We wanted students to think of the project in work terms and to consider Wikimedia a client who was consulting about the state of its technical documentation (and might not necessarily know what its needs were.)
 * Students produced a report with a set of specific (to Toolforge) and global recommendations for Technical Documentation across Wikimedia projects.

Summer 2018
Upcoming!

Open Documentation for Open Organizations
Part of ongoing IRL meetup series for FOSS | FLOSS collaborators

Lauri Apple will join us at the Wikimedia Foundation for a collaborative meet-up. We will be discussing her work on Feedmereadmes, a project that seeks to engage volunteer technical writers and editors to contribute to FOSS documentation. We’ll discuss this project, how we can make it useful to other open organizations, and how we might collaborate to improve documentation across the movement.

Who should attend this event?

Individuals who are currently contributing to open source software projects and want to improve documentation. Technical writers, technical editors, and software developers who want to use their documentation skills to support FOSS projects.