[australia] Engaging contributors

[Luke Hoban]

The "content fairies" responsibility thing is an interesting point ~
once the content is up to date you have to put it into someone job
description that they are responsible for keeping it up to date,
and/or put it innto their annual report ~ otherwise in 6 months time
its out of date, untrusted and its time to do it all again.

Those organisations that value their content are moving away from
'historical/ad hoc' documentation to live doco that is constantly
maintained. Unfortunatley, its really only those orgs in regulatory
industries that are *compelled* to get it up to date and keep it there
(so mil/bio/fire/gov type orgs).

I guess this also highlights the different CMSs out there, to date
most are glorified filing systems where people dump their historical
doco ~ a filing cabinet that became a network drive, than became and
intranet.  The alternative is a blob of xml that can be delived via
multiple channels as it changes. So the business decides that the pack
now comes in green in the morning, the pack color changes in the xml
and by the end of the day there is new hmtl, pdf, ppt and print
outputs in English. By the end of day two all the other languages must
be done.

Catch you for a beer at OpenPublish,

cheers,


Luke Hoban


PS Many thanks for stirring up the list ;-)


On 7/13/06, Marius Coomans <mcoomans at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Matt,
>
> Good points, but I wouldn't be so quick in dismissing wikipedia as a red
> herring.
>
> Yes, it's driven by passionate people, but is that a bad thing? By making it
> easy for readers to become writers, and employing, in effect, a reverse
> workflow (publish before editing) it successfully engages a broad audience.
>
> You might not want to manage your website's front page the same way, but
> perhaps a mix of anonymity and low friction editing would work well when
> documenting internal processes etc. in an intranet application. That's where
> we don't always do a great job encouraging contributions from people at "the
> rockface".
>
> Marius
>
>
>
> On 7/13/06, Matthew Moore < matthew.moore at oracle.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > Hi Marius,
> >
> > Random thoughts:
> > - Because for most people this is still something "extra" to their jobs,
> not seen as part of their actual work activities. All this stuff will be the
> responsibility of the "content fairy".
> > - Many content management systems are still very complicated.
> > - Unless the people that provide content are close to users you have a
> problem.
> >
> > I think Wikipedia is a red herring. It has a dedicated editorial team (1%
> of its visitors)
> http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/2006/05/charting_wiki_p.html
> and it's driven by what contributors feel passionate about.
> >
> > The thing with blogs is you have to look at the whole blogging ecosystem.
> IBM was pretty far ahead with interrnal blogging (I used to work there).
> About 300 or 0.1% of IBM employees were regular internal bloggers (and this
> is a hi-tech organisation). About 15,000 or 5% of employees viewed &
> commented on the blog posts.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Matt
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: australia-bounces at lists.cmprofessionals.org
> [mailto: australia-bounces at lists.cmprofessionals.org]On
> Behalf Of Marius Coomans
> > Sent: Thursday, 13 July 2006 9:18 AM
> > To: australia at lists.cmprofessionals.org
> > Subject: [australia] Engaging contributors
> >
> >
> > I received some encouraging emails in response to my last message, so I'm
> sufficiently emboldened to help breath a bit of life into this list. With
> its eclectic array of subscribers, there is bound to be a great store of
> wisdom and experience here.
> >
> > So:
> >
> > Over the past 10 years, our industry has (largely) mastered the technology
> and processes to successfully implement Content Management Systems. However,
> in many cases, those systems still fail to engage those who have most
> content to contribute.
> >
> > Why is that? How can our success rate be improved? How do we balance
> "process" with "creativity"? Can we leverage the success of Weblogs and that
> of Wikipedia?
> >
> >
> > Marius Coomans
> > Active Web Communications
> >
> >
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> australia at lists.cmprofessionals.org
> http://lists.cmsml.org/mailman/listinfo/australia
>
>
>


-- 
Luke Hoban
emorphus
+61 409 905 539