STC India 2013 don day-being relevant in 2028

Being Relevant in 2028:
Strategies for Future Proofing Your
Content
1
BY
DON DAY, CONTELLIGENCE GROUP LLC
Copyright © 2013 Contelligence Group, LLC 11/14/2014

Premise
 Today, it is a given that
your content may be
published in many
formats.
 Tomorrow, it is inevitable
that your content will be
repurposed in ways that
you have not imagined.
 Is it ready for that future?
2

We live in a disposable culture
3
 60 million Snapchat images are exchanged and then
deleted every day
 Social media tools encourage thinking “in the
moment”
 We are trained to be conscientious as writers, but
bad habits can cling to us!
 How to be watchful against “disposable culture” in
our writing

How long is documentation life cycle?
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 Will someone be reading your content many years
from now, say in 2028?
 Tablet and phone apps (part of our disposable culture) often
have short life cycles (months)
 Banking and reservation applications must always be
operational; some components may have been developed 30
years ago
 Future use of that content may look nothing like how you
deliver content today

Case in point
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 Web sites with fixed layout are not mobile friendly
 Responsive Web Design covers more devices
 With wearable computing, what does the future
hold? Google Glass, smart watches, near field radio

We Prepare by Future Proofing
 Common definition:
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 Providing hooks for plugging in future updates
 Preferred definition:
 Following good architectural principles that will persist
 Durable content!
 Two aspects of durability:
 Medium: will the format still be around in 2028?
(Rosetta Stone example)
 Message: will anyone care what I write about today in
2028?

Don’s Strategies for Future Proofed Content
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1. Don’t try to anticipate the future; use architecture
2. Follow the lead of your product
3. Context-Free Content
4. Transition-Free Content
5. Content vs Presentation vs Context
6. Provide indexing, metadata and semantic
properties
7. Colloquial, affected style shows its age
8. Content is a business asset

1. Don’t try to anticipate the future:
You might be creating new work there!
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 Wrong predictions can be expensive to fix later on
 The most important principle: Good Architecture
 For example:
 Open Standards – formats that are not tied to
proprietary tools or services
 Design Patterns – describing common problems and
their solutions in a general way
 Templates – the basic solution for consistency across
types of content
 Guidelines – architectural principles for authors to
follow (versus rules for tools)

2. Follow the lead of your product
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 Product architecture is usually stable;
 Information about a motor or an API will rarely change
 Product user interfaces may change, influenced by:
 Fashions and materials
 Regulations
 User experience improvements
 Paradox:
 The less showy parts of a product are most likely to still be in
publication years from now.
 Follow the architecture.

3. Context-Free Content
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 No dependencies on required previous reading
 Clear and self-dependent title, description text,
and supporting images
 Follow best practice recommendations:
 Developing Quality Technical Information:
http://www.amazon.com/Developing-Quality-Technical-
Information-Handbook/dp/0131477498
 Nielsen research: http://www.useit.com/articles/write-for-
reuse/
 CIDM Best Practices:
http://www.infomanagementcenter.com/
 Every Page is Page One: http://everypageispageone.com/

4. Transition-Free Content
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 Today’s transitions are tomorrow’s speed bumps
 “See the next chapter”, “See below”
 “Next we will look at…”, “Previously we discussed…”
 When content on either side of a transition needs to be
reused independently, cleaning up the transition is
costly
 Good information design can minimize relational
dependencies
 This point is a special case of the “#3. Context Free”
rule which I can refer to with a link to avoid use of a
transitional phrase.

5. Content vs Presentation vs Context
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 Presentation (formatting) and Context (linking,
placement) are “orthogonal” to Content
 Orthogonal refers to separation of concerns:
 Prefer the writing system’s management of Presentation
 Use paragraph and character styles vs individual font overrides
 Prefer the writing system’s management of Context
 Navigational: reading sequences, related information
 Relational: parent/child links, related concepts, related terms, etc.
 For Content, focus on:
 Structure
 Use styles or markup to describe “what it is,” not “what it looks like”
 Identity
 Indexing or properties that enable selective retrieval, ideally on
semantic sub-structure (for example, terms in a glossary)

6. Provide sufficient indexing, metadata and
semantic properties
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 Can someone actually find this component in a
search?
 Can this component be retrieved by query for use in
a sidebar on a Web page?
 Adaptive content is all about enabling content to be
selected and used in new ways at finer granularity
than just “the page”

7. Colloquial, affected style shows its age
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Compare this 1870 definition of geology:
 Of what materials is the earth composed, and in what manner are
these materials arranged? These are the first inquiries with which
Geology is occupied, a science which derives its name from the Greek
ge, the earth, and logos, a discourse. Previously to experience we
might have imagined that investigations of this kind would relate
exclusively to the mineral kingdom, and to the various rocks, soils,
and metals, which occur upon the surface of the earth, or at various
depths beneath it. But, in pursuing such researches, we soon find
ourselves led on to consider the successive changes which have taken
place in the former state of the earth's surface and interior, and the
causes which have given rise to these changes; and, what is still more
singular and unexpected, we soon become engaged in researches into
the history of the animate creation, or of the various tribes of animals
and plants which have, at different periods of the past, inhabited the
globe. 1870 definition of "Geology" (Elements of Geology,
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3772/pg3772.html)

7. Affected style, continued
15
With this modern definition:
 the science that deals with the dynamics and physical history
of the earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the
physical, chemical, and biological changes that the earth has
undergone or is undergoing.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/geology

8. Content is a business asset
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 The content you create is intellectual property—it is
literally part of the business
 It has value as a corporate asset—it is part of the
product
 It has value as a personal achievement—it is part of
your canon of experience
 Would you build a place of work with anything less
than the best bricks?

Parting thought:
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 Tape a bank deposit slip next to your workstation.
 Whenever you hit “Save,” you are making a deposit
into a sort of savings account.
 Make sure that what you deposit has the qualities for
providing that future value!

Questions?
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Contact info
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Don R. Day
Co-Founder, ContelligenceGroup.com
Co-Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
LinkedIn: donrday Twitter: @donrday
About.me: donrday Skype: don.r.day
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
--T.S. Eliot

STC India 2013 don day-being relevant in 2028

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