The Key Is Community: Building a Documentation Community

Technical writers are turning a corner away from gatekeeping and towards content management, information organization, and enabling the writing of others. Just teaching others to write has been done and done again. What’s been missing is the glue to hold all the teaching together – community.
So how do you show value to your boss when you’re not the one doing the writing? How do you explain the value of a community?

The Support, Product, Acquisition, Contribution, Engagement, Success (SPACES) model was developed to plan and cultivate customer communities for businesses. We use it to turn employees into documentation community members. This model provides a framework to identify key performance indicators for your community, create a plan that spans product and support, and creates pathways (and rewards) for engagement.

Being part of STC we all know that a sense of community feeds engagement, and when people know what they’re getting out of participation they’re more likely to contribute. Sometimes it can be communication skills to avoid meetings, cutting down on tickets through better documentation, or the simple satisfaction of knowing exactly why the user manual you got is terrible.