Content as a driver of change: then and now
Presented by
Lana Brindley
Thursday
1:20 p.m.–2:05 p.m.
Target audience:
User
Abstract
Since the earliest people wandered the Earth, we have shared stories and fables designed to teach, entertain, and inform those who came after us. The only difference between technical communicators and the Brothers Grimm, is the sophistication of the tools we use.
Technical communication used to be about determining what content people needed, researching, and writing it. As the world has changed, and as content has become free, democratised, and much more readily available (Google, anyone?) the problem space has moved from "what do we document?" to "how do we organise all this?".
The content generation model has been turned on its head.
In this presentation, Lana will explore how content has changed through history, explain some of the newest content curation models, how they are applied to modern technical writing teams, and go through some of the challenges in changing your documentation curation model.
Presented by
Lana Brindley
Lana has been playing and working with technology since she was eaten by a grue during a particularly eventful summer in the 90s. Not long after that she spent far too much time at university, and eventually decided to get a real job. She started out doing technical documentation for open source cloudy-type products, and now she works for Rackspace as the manager of a documentation team, from her home in Brisbane Australia. She also keeps getting elected as the documentation lead (PTL) for OpenStack, through no fault of her own. If she ever works out how that keeps happening, she'll write the manual for that, too.