Anne Gentle’s Conversation and Community, now in its second edition, has become the go-to reference for social media and technical communication. Her clear-eyed survey of the social media landscape has been adopted by many universities and is widely used by technical communicators.
The ebook edition of Anne Gentle’s book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, is now available for free on this site. The print edition is being taken out of print, but may remain available through used-book sellers.
The book is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License, which is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/. While not technically an open source license as defined by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) (https://opensource.org/osd), the intention for choosing a Creative Commons license is to share and share alike.
In plain language, that license means that anyone can copy or adapt, and even distribute text from the book as long as the redistribution gives appropriate credit and does not charge for any adaptations created. This license choice means that people can reuse it in workshops, in classrooms, and even pull out parts of it for reuse in other works. You can even take a BY-NC original work and adapt it and release under a new license, BY-NC-ND (Non-Noncommercial, No Derivatives) or BY-NC-SA (Non-Noncommercial, Share Alike).
Original Description
Anne Gentle’s Conversation and Community, has become the go-to reference for social media and technical communication. Her clear-eyed survey of the social media landscape has been adopted by many universities and is widely used by technical communicators.
The second edition contains new chapters on building a content strategy, analyzing web techniques, and developing an open source strategy. Along with a greatly expanded bibliography and updates throughout, there are more interviews and more case studies, making this ground-breaking book even more useful.
Contents
Towards the Future of Documentation
How people communicate about technical topics today
The changing roles of writers
Defining conversation
Agile development
Why move content to the social web?
Social media, social networking, and now the social web
Defining a Writer’s Role with the Social Web
Challenges and opportunities
Building a strategy
The documentation environment
Community and Documentation
What is a community?
Motivations for writers and online communities
Real-world events
Book sprints
Commenting and Connecting with Users
Monitoring conversations
Starting and maintaining a blog
Customer blog infrastructure
Integrating user content into user assistance
Moderating or participating in online forums
Instant messaging and responses
Writing reviews
Integrating social tagging
Sharing photos and videos for explanation or assistance
Wikis as Documentation Systems
Wikis for projects
Starting or reinvigorating a wiki
Inheriting a large wiki
Working in a wiki
Wiki round tripping
Single-sourcing and repurposing
Understanding wiki patterns and wiki structures
Alternatives when a wiki is not the right match
Talking with writers of wikis
Wiki examples
Wiki wrap up
Finding Your Voice
Style guidelines
Publishing strategies
Idea generation
Living and working with conversation and community
Content Strategy for Community Documentation — NEW Chapter
Listen and monitor first
Find the business goals
Community and content audits
Case Study: Community Content Strategy at Autodesk
Analyzing and Measuring Web Techniques — NEW Chapter
Managing community methods
Measuring effectiveness
Fitting into the community
Encouraging grassroots efforts
Measuring documentation as conversation
Open Source Documentation — NEW Chapter
Open source, how does it work?
Open documentation community strategies
Open source starting points
Licensing considerations
Not about tools
Community content strategist
Appendix A: Concepts and Tools of the Social Web
New media content categories
Social web techniques
Learning about social media
Appendix B: Easter Seals Internet Public Discourse Policy
Appendix C: A Case Study from Smart Content in the Enterprise — NEW Case Study
Managing Content for Continuous Learning at Autodesk: When DITA Flows into a Social Web Platform
“I was an early adopter of wikis, but had reached a saturation point after Linkedin and before Facebook. As a result, I was vague on what a lot of these social things are, so Chapter 2 has been useful.”
— David Cramer
“I have felt for a while that this is where I wanted to go as a technical writer, but I wasn’t sure where to start or if it was even possible. Your book is giving me the confirmation that I’m on the right track and all the amazing links in it are helping me develop the knowledge I need to get there. You have no idea how excited I am:)”
— Nathalie Laroche
“…the book has value to web workers of all stripes. The book is practical, up to date and isn’t just a “me too” social media tome.”
“The consistent, confident, professional tone kept me riveted…” “I highly recommend this book to both technical communicators and those involved in social media and community. My copy is going straight to my boss’ desk.”
“If you think community participation in your documentation is coming soon, read this book immediately. If you think that it’s not coming, you’re wrong, and you especially need to read this book.”
We offer non-DRM ebook editions for most XML Press publications as a three-format bundle:
ePub
Kindle (.mobi)
PDF
Once you purchase a bundle, you will receive email with a download link.
Print editions and single-format ebook editions of our books are available from most online book retailers.
Note on the .mobi format: This format is provided to make it easier to sideload to older Kindle devices. For the best reading experience with newer Kindles, we recommend that you use the email to Kindle feature and send the epub version to your Kindle.
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