But we need your input. Where would you like us to focus our energies? For example, Scriptorium Publishing is offered a series of inexpensive webinars as a substitute for conferences. Are there additional speakers or topics you would like for us to add? Cherryleaf has a mentoring group for documentation managers. Should we create similar groups in Melbourne and the Research Triangle area? Should we increase the geographic scope of Hyperwrite’s AODC conference?

Drop us a note in the comments.

Anne Gentle

Even if your documentation system does not converse with your users, your documentation can help customers talk to each other and make the connections that help them do their jobs well or learn something new as if they were in a classroom with a community for classmates. This talk describes how you can think about documentation and user assistance in a conversational way, with the help of social media technology. Anne Gentle discusses the topics in her new book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. She’ll describe the use of in-person Book Sprints that combine wikis and community events to gather together writers to accomplish documentation goals.

About Anne Gentle

Anne Gentle is a senior technical writer and blogger who has over ten years of experience. She started blogging for her employer at talk.bmc.com, and then moved the content to www.justwriteclick.com. Anne has acquired many interests, including structured authoring, wikis, XML models for software documentation such as DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture), blogging, online user assistance, and writing in an Agile development environment. Anne is a volunteer maintainer of the One
Laptop Per Child user manual housed at FLOSS Manuals. Anne is the lead for the STC Intercom Editorial Advisory Panel to guide the editorial calendar for 2009 and 2010. She currently works as a senior technical writer at Advanced Solutions
International, which provides business and membership management software for professional organizations, churches, and other non-profits including the Society for Technical Communication.

Register for Documentation as Conversation

• Demystifying DITA to PDF Publishing, June 2, 11 a.m. Eastern time (Sarah O’Keefe)
• Hacking the DITA Open Toolkit, June 4, 11 a.m. Eastern time (Simon Bate)

Each webinar is $20.