It was a fascinating first day at Lavacon. The panel discussion this morning covered content strategy with regards to social media. While amusing, it also got us thinking about providing content for various devices (some of them possibly not yet created) rather than publishing deliverables. Collaboration/feedback from users is going to become a vital and integral part of our content lifecycle, so it's time to start planning for it.
This was followed by an Andrea Ames session on leadership (very interesting) and then a one-on-one interview with Val Swisher from Content Rules on the importance of creating and maintaining a lexicon in a DITA world.
Joe Gollner's keynote on content strategy was high level, but covered the vital parts of strategic thinking, including the ability to integrate all the pieces of strategy together. Strategy means a systematic
solution to handling content, leveraged to the max by technology. Efficient, streamlined, and useful to everyone who creates, maintains, publishes, and consumes it (my words, not his).
This was followed by another Andrea Ames session (and follow-up interview), this time on progressive disclosure. Progressive disclosure is one of those things that everyone's been doing a little bit of, but no one's really embraced it the way she has with her team at IBM. It takes providing the right content to the right people at the right time to its tangible conclusion: providing suitably deep/shallow content with the right widget/format/output as needed. Tenets of this practice include making the UI as intuitive and user friendly as possible and providing documentation that covers goal-based documentation (in the users' words, please) that covers more than just product functionality, but takes it one step further and documents a business goal instead. Required for this to work: Deep and ongoing knowledge of your users. I like this approach very much. Minimize the feature-related documentation by building a great UI, then document the stuff that's really useful. Documentation becomes both streamlined and more valuable. The product (UI and documentation included) is wildly improved.
I ended the day with an interview (with TechWhirl co-writer Roger Renteria) with SDL Andrew Thomas, where I grilled him on the future of content lifecycles with Tridion. He came out unscathed.
I was fortunate enough to win a free copy of Adobe Tech Comm Suite 3.5 at Adobe's 25th anniversary party for FrameMaker in the evening. Lucky!
I'll be writing some content on each of these sessions and interviews in the coming days, but so far Lavacon has been thought provoking and more than just a little bit of fun.
