There is, in my view, an interesting question in the more community-oriented approach to documentation (or information development). At what point do you switch from creating content for a currently available release to the “next” release. Tech writers are *traditionally* working towards creating content for the next release. In the community model, which I have some exposure to, we spend quite a bit of time working on content for the currently shipping release.

Which has more value? Content for a product currently generating revenue, or working towards content for the next thing? When do you make the switch? How many of your team resources (staff, materials, time, etc) should be spent divided between each type of release? How many releases could you ever support at one time (does the community decide)?

Another question I would throw out is: if the community decides what is needed, what happens if/when they are wrong? People assume the community will provide for its own needs as and when they are needed, but what if they don't.

There are business implications here beyond the confines of simple content creation/dissemination philosophy.

Authenticity is a crucial underpinning of documentation, and given user perceptions of documentation in general, perhaps not something “we” have been very good at doing.

Community models are gaining acceptance, and do provide some interesting pathways for the future of documentation/information development, but I think it is easy to get swept up in the romance of the notion of community. Changing methods can be very positive, but that doesn't mean we throw away the good parts of what we are already doing. It would also be good to see much more behavioral research done so we can better understand how best to facilitate information dissemination, and for my part I think we will find that for some types of information, such as reference material, large PDFs will still prevail.

But titles aside, I'm very interested in the implications of social media on help and documentation. I don't have concrete answers to the questions you raise, but I certainly think a lot about where our profession is headed. I believe that getting rid of the “manual” paradigm is a first step. I have been in the field long enough to have worked extensively with both print and online media, and we have been saying for years that online media would make print obsolete. And we still joke about the fact that “nobody reads the manual.” Yet, I train a lot of technical writers and help developers, and a clear majority of the companies that they work for want to produce printed output along with the help.

Along with the cumbersome nature of printed tomes, I believe that the traditional model of online help is falling into obsolescence, too. Even recently I have searched for product help using what I felt were obvious search words, only to have the app help fail to return anything related to what I was asking.

I firmly believe that the answers lie in effective product design: intuitive interfaces and embedded help. We have been talking and writing about embedded help for years, too, but I still find the adoption rate to be relatively slow.

Anyway, thanks for the great post. I look forward to reading your blog regularly.