infotexture

Content Strategy Forum 2011 in London

roger — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 14:56:50 +0000

From September 5 to 7, a raucous band of content strategists, information architects, writers, web managers, designers, and a bunch of other smart people descend on London for CS Forum London, an international content strategy conference that promises to be at least as brilliant as last years’ version in Paris.

I’ll be there, and you should come too! Hope to see you there…

Talk @ tekom: Social Versioning

roger — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 11:01:57 +0000

This year, the annual tekom spring conference will be held right here in Potsdam from April 14–15. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to attend a conference so close to home, and will be speaking on social versioning and the use of distributed version control systems for collaborative authoring of documentation.

My presentation is scheduled for Friday, April 15 at 11:30. The German title is:

Soziale Versionskontrolle für die Doku? Verteilte Versionsverwaltung als soziales Netzwerk

I’ll outline the advantages of version control in technical documentation projects, briefly trace the evolution from centralized versioning systems to distributed environments and social versioning platforms such as GitHub and investigate options for the use of distributed version control to support collaborative documentation authoring workflows.

For information on the conference (in German), see the tekom landing page for the conference. Though it isn’t immediately clear when the page loads, the links in the navigation menu on the left are all specific to the spring conference in Potsdam, including the program, list of speakers and registration information.

Details on my talk are available in the program, and I’ll post more information here as the event approaches.

See you soon in Potsdam…

Accessible Documentation

roger — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 21:22:46 +0000

I was recently asked to give a presentation on the relationship between technical documentation and accessibility for an event held at the University of Applied Sciences here in Potsdam.

The event was organized by the Institute for Information and Documentation (IID) in the Faculty of Information Science and supported by the German-Austrian office of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

In the German words of the organizers:

Die Veranstaltung gibt einen Überblick über die Grundlagen der Barrierefreiheit in der technischen Dokumentation. Dabei stellt das Seminar auch die speziellen Anforderungen an zugängliche Dokumente aus der Sicht der Betroffenen als entscheidende Experten in eigener Sache dar.

My role was to describe the environment in which technical documentation is created and provide an overview of current “best practices” in technical documentation that provide a foundation for accessible documents.

My main point was that accessibility need not be viewed as an expensive afterthought tacked on for the benefit of a minority, but rather as a natural byproduct of documentation done well. This borrows from the concept of “universal design” in that the same best practices used to produce good documentation also provide a solid foundation for accessibility – built-in for the benefit of all users.

In keeping with one of the most important principles in information design – the separation of content and presentation – I prepared my slides using a plain text file in Markdown format and converted to XHTML for presentation via the Simple Standards-based Slide Show System (S5).

If you’d like to see the slides (in German), an archive of the source file and XHTML output is available here. The S5 file is the plain text version that can be opened in any text editor. The HTML version contains the slides as they were presented (requires a standards-compliant browser such as Chrome, Firefox or Safari, with JavaScript enabled).

infotexture

Content Strategy Forum 2011 in London

Talk @ tekom: Social Versioning

Accessible Documentation

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