You Own Nothing: Content as Community Property
Presentation Abstract
The most important thing to understand when implementing content reuse strategies is that content is community property, and in order for your content reuse implementation to be beneficial for your team and company, writers must view content from a global perspective. This concept challenges writers to author content in generic ways so as to maintain consistent writing and DITA styles so that the content can be reused by other writers. While authoring new content, writers must consider how a topic can impact any product guide within the repository or how a topic can potentially change in the future.
Thinking of content as community property is most important when using Content References (conrefs). Conrefs enable multiple writers to use the same chunk of content in numerous topics. With conrefs, the content must be written generically so that a writer can use the content for any product, and the writer must limit changes to that content so as to not make the content specific for one product but inaccurate for other products.
Understandably, there will be some product-specific content that writers cannot write generically, and that’s okay. Content reuse doesn’t require every piece of content to be written generically, but it challenges writers to not write content in silos, which enables the team to maintain one company voice and decrease localization costs.
Meet the Presenter
Marcia Garnett is a Senior Technical Writer for Polycom, Inc. where she establishes and implements content reuse strategies for the documentation team. She is also a member of the DITA Strategies and Information Architecture teams and works with a group of writers to strategize ways to improve the team’s DITA implementation. She also trains writers within the team on proper implementation of the content model, content reuse, and DITA practices.