Eliciting Participation in Collaborative Content Design
In October, I presented a poster at the HighEd WebDev conference in Rochester, NY to share how my colleagues and I collaborated to develop content in three recent web/information projects.
Here's a summary:
- For one of the projects, we used a wiki to co-write the content and edit each other's drafts. This method allowed everyone a chance to see how the site was forming and add any information they had.
- For another project, pairs of people arranged keywords to help define the focus of a site.
- For the third project, we gathered as many people as possible to test a new software system and make notes about updates needed to the old online help pages. This would have taken the usual documentation team a month to complete, but having everyone help sped up the process and gave us a wider perspective about what was and wasn't working.
