Tag Archives: structured authoring

IA and TechComm at EUROIA14

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Continuing my flashback notes, after Brighton and Bucharest, let me take you to the third B-named city I had visited within a month: Brussels. I finally managed to attend EUROIA, the Information Architecture conference in Europe last September. They closed the 10-year loop back in Brussels and I joined just in time to celebrate and received a cool anniversary T-shirt.

This was quite a change from the usual techcomm conferences. In my “scrapcloud” attempt I mentioned only a few of the terms that stuck with me from EUROIA14, but it was so much more. It took me to the… “liminal”-zone 🙂

EUROIA14 scrapcloud

We were shown the artistic side of information architecture through presentations about design, architecture, innovation, anthropology and psychology. But in the same time, workshops and presentations confirmed that info architects and user experience designers are facing similar challenges technical communicators do. Lots of familiar images: spreadsheets for content auditing, models to sort, chunk and reuse information. One page per thing was an often mentioned rule, as well as MRUs (minimum reusable units). Ontologies and linking are of course vital, since they are the very mechanism that keeps the web running. Does CORE model sound familiar to tech writers yet? It should: Create Once, Reuse Everywhere. And the statement that probably got just as much ovation and Twitter coverage as the marriage proposal in the end, was the reminder that Content is f*** King!

What also seemed a déjà vu, was the effort of info architects to establish their role and responsibilities within companies and workflows. we are all in the center

After seeing in various projects and books those diagrams with all team members or skills in their little circles, all pointing to the project manager (call it scrum master if you will) in the center, then seeing the same in slides trying to define the technical writers’ job and how they should position themselves and communicate with all other roles in their projects… it was the IA and UX designers’ turn to flip the charts.

Good to know we’re not alone and interesting to see we are trying to connect with the same roles in our projects: managers, developers, engineers, testers, etc.

Can hardly wait for the next EUROIA and I hope to see some more conferences adopting their agenda model:  workshops every morning, presentations and lightning talks in the afternoon, dozens of books to give away each evening.

Is structure about code or about content?

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Here’s a short one, cause I’m writing on a train to Nuremberg…

When writers are not used to structured authoring and have to adopt a standard like DITA, they tend to blame DITA and the new tools for complicating their lives. In the new process, the first thing writers notice is that they have to use elements they are not familiar with, and that there are various ways to use them.

Unless they go through training on structured authoring, they start with the wrong plan, that the unstructured text (and thinking) would just have to be mapped to the new structure, as “structure” would be about code, not about writing.

Indeed, the XML code sets a valid structure to the topics, but there is more to structure than applying DITA elements. Documentation can benefit from the principles of structured authoring even without adopting a certain standard. You can do your project research and information model, define your own house rules and styles, to provide consistent, minimalistic, reusable documentation, in almost any authoring environment.

Do not blame DITA or the tools, that you have to structure your procedures or your lists of parameters in a certain way. Ideally, you would have seen the need for that structure before, and thanked Heaven (or the DITA committee) when the standard came and you rushed with the business case to your team and managers.

Happy DIT’ing!