Improving the effectiveness of information

Technical communication has in my opinion never been limited to writing only. As I wrote before technical communicators can act as usability expert, business modelers and information architects. With the launch of Be Free, the, the worldwide community of Be Informed Personal Edition users, I find my self in a new role: managing the community. To do so, I write, teach and present, constantly adapting my outgoing information and message to the reactions that come from my community. Building up the community For years now I am writing and presenting about using semantic technology in a model-driven environment. This technology offers great advantages opposed to more traditional development methods and it also offers opportunities to create smarter documentation. One of the main obstacles in my story was always that in order to work with this technology, a company would have to invest in a full-blown implementation featuring both the workstation ánd the server side of the software. Wi...

In my previous article, I described how I used a Card Method to gather input from my audience for a Smart Documentation solution. My approach for these sessions was: I prepared approximately 20 cards with topics from the current version of the system I invited 18 respondents for a 30 minutes session The sessions consisted of three parts: To start with, I asked every respondent to make five cards for the five topics that they would like to find on the new system. By narrowing it down to five, I encourage them to only write down the most important topics. At the end of this step I asked them to make categories of these five cards, each category forming a column on the table. In the next step I - one by one - gave them the prepared topics and asked the respondent to add them to an existing category or create a new category for it. When all cards were done, we reviewed the categories and made final adjustments In the final step, the respondent wrote down the labels for the categor...