Innovation in tech comm 1.0 Sustaining and disruptive innovations 1.1 A long list of technical innovations semi-relevant to technical writers 1.2 The only significant innovation for tech comm 1.3 XML and the web: drifting farther apart? 1.4 The genius of Github and how it can transform tech comm 1.5 Microsoft and the last 5 great technological innovations 1.6 Piggybacking onto the innovation of the web 1.7 Some web tools worth using in help solutions 1.8 Static site generators start to replace web publishing platforms like WordPress 1.9 How to create a help API 2.0 Pushing content into any format with Jekyll 2.1 Slides for tcworld India 2015 presentations 2.2 → Recording of Innovation in Technical Communication keynote at tcworld India 2015 The following video is a recording of the keynote presentation I gave at tcworld India 2015 in Bangalore. In this presentation, I lay out a (hopefully persuasive) case for a new direction that tech comm writers can take in their tooling, arguing that the hotbed of innovation taking place today is with web tools and web platforms, not so much in the tech comm space, which seems to follow its own independent development track outside of web tools. http://youtu.be/dFN2XHcl6uY You can flip through my slides here: Or clone and fork the slides from Github here: https://github.com/tomjohnson1492/innovation. You can download the audio here: Download MP3 (right-click and select Save As) Summary The general outline of the presentation is as follows: Startups are great places to innovate. Innovation can be divided into at least two types: sustaining innovation and disruptive innovations. Disruptive innovations operate in the background as their technology matures; eventually they overtake the mainstream technology. Mainstream technology operates in a different value network and can't necessarily sink time and resources into research and development because they're too busy working on the next feature for their sustaining innovations. Innovation has a number of dilemmas — the time required to innovate can sideline your existing projects; you might have too much legacy content to make a change; you might not have the engineering background to build the tools you need; and you might be putting your career in jeopardy by investing in an obscure technology. There's a lot of pressure to follow the mainstream technology, especially DITA. I implemented DITA and worked with it for several projects, but eventually I found it too restrictive. Everything I tried to do required all kinds of hacks and workarounds. In looking in the space I was working in (API documentation), XML seemed to be an older technology not really used much. Instead, all the web developers are pretty much creating platforms that process HTML, Markdown, and JavaScript. REST APIs return responses in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), not XML, and that communication protocol seems to reverberate throughout the web developer's toolchain. In looking at how people publish on the web, I noticed that many people use Github to share and develop code. Github is considered one of the most revolutionary technologies of the web. It allows developers to share, distribute, clone, and fork code, which gives rise to a lot of innovation. Developers don't work so much in isolation anymore. The code becomes living code samples on their local machine — you can continually update them as the origin gets updated. This phenomenon is referred to as "social coding." There's no reason why documentation can't be treated as code as well. Instead of working in binary file formats (which only computers can read), you can work with text-file formats, using a text editor (such as Sublime), committing your documentation to a code repository to share, version, and collaborate, and publishing via build scripts run on the command line. In fact, you can even create PowerPoint presentations in code. This presentation uses Reveal JS instead of PowerPoint. Everythin