Linux.conf.au 2017 – Thursday – Session 2

Content as a driver of change: then and now – Lana Brindley

  • Humans have always told stories
  • Cave Drawings
    • Australian Indigenous art is the oldest continuous art in the world
    • Stories of extinct mega-fauna
    • Stories of morals but sometimes also funny
  • Early Written Manuals
    • We remember the Eureka
  • Religious Leaders
    • Gutenburg
    • Bible was only redistributed book, restricted to clergy
  • Fairy Tales
    • Charles Perrault versions.
    • Brother Grim
    • Cautionary tales for adults
    • Very gruesome in the originals and many versions
    • Easiest and entertaining way for illiterate people to share moral stories
  • Master and Apprentice
    • Cheap Labour and Learn a Trade
  • Journals and Letters
    • In the early 19th century letter writing started happoning
    • Recipe Books

 

  • Recently
  • Paper Manuals
    • Traditionally the proper method for technical docs
  • Whitepapers
    • Printed version will probably go away
    • Digital form may live on
  • Training Courses
    • Face to face training has it’s benifits
    • Online is where techical stuff is moving
  • Online Books
    • Online version of a printed book
    • Designed to be read from beginning to end, TOC, glossary, etc

 

  • Today
  • MOOCS
    • Quite common
  • Data Typing (DITA)
    • Break down the content into logical pices
    • Store in a database
    • Mix on the fly
    • Doing this sort of the since 1960s and 1970s
  • Single Sourcing
    • Walked away from old idea of telling a story
    • Look at how people consumed and learnt difficult concepts
    • Deliver the same content many ways (beginner user, advanced, reference)
    • Chunks of information we can deliver however we like
  • User-Side Content Curation
    • Organised like a wikipedia article
    • Imagine a side listing lots of cars for sale, the filters curate the content
  • What comes next?
    • Large datasets and let people filter
    • Power going from producers to consumers
    • Consumers want to filter themselves, not leave the producers to do this
  • References and further reading for talk

I am your user. Why do you hate me? Donna Benjamin

  • Free and open source software suffers from poor usability
  • We’ve struggled with open source software, heard devs talk about users with contempt
  • We define users by what they can’t do
  • How do I hate thee let I count the ways
    • Why were we being made to feel stupid when we used free software
    • Software is “made by me for me”, just for brainiac me
    • Lots of stories about stupid users. Should we be calling our users stupid?
    • We often talk/draw about users as faceless icons
    • Take pride in having prickly attitudes
  • Users
    • Whiney, entitled and demanding
    • We wouldn’t want some of them as friends
    • Not talk about those sort of users
  • Lets Chat about chat
    • Slack – used by OS projects, not the freest, propritory
    • Better in many ways less friction, in many ways
  • Steep Learning curves
    • How long to get to the level of (a) Stop hating it? (b) Are Kicking ass
    • How do we get people over that level as quickly as possible
    • They don’t want to be badass at using your tool. They want you to be badass at what using your tool allows them to do
    • Badass: Making Users Awesome – Kathy Sierra
  • Perfect is the enemy of the good
  • Understand who your users are; see them as people like your friends and colleagues; not faceless icons

 

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