Community Summit - Mike Hendrickson

1. Content, Communities & Beyond
Mike Hendrickson
VP Content Strategy

2. What we do
 Spreading the Knowledge of Innovators
 Creating more value that we capture
 Working on Stuff that matters
 Mining the synapses of our emerging Global brain
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Events, FOOS, Summits, in-Person meetings
 Do we learn from content, or does content learn from us?
 Our customers, communities and partners provide us with insights to what is
needed in the market at any given point in time.
 And we have heard this often: Developers want content earlier, more often, and
updated.

3. What our author/communities do
 No DRM in our books
– Obscurity is more of a threat than Theft
– David Pogue example
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“The results? It was true. The thing was pirated to the skies. It’s all over the Web now, ridiculously easy to
download without paying. The crazy thing was, sales of the book did not fall. In fact, sales rose slightly
during that year. That’s not a perfect, all-variables-equal experiment, of course; any number of factors
could explain the results. But for sure, it wasn’t the disaster I’d feared.”
 We want as many people to get the content in the format they want
 Create engagement around content
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OFPS
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Safari – and early release (500k B2B)
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Chapters, reviewing, social media,
user groups
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Atlas

4. Changing Landscape of Documentation
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Documentation is part of the UI
Documentation is part of your API
Documentation is part of your partnerships
Documentation is part of your DNA to thrive
Documentation needs to be part of every Device
Documentation needs to be relevant, practical
and current
 Documentation needs to be in different
learning modes – Video, audio, etc.
 Documentation needs to be free

5. Early Example of Engagement – The Web
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More than 40,000 units (33k just for community)
More than $800k revenue ($550k)
Top 15 in Safari when released (B2B)
More than 20,000 comments
Free everywhere
http://www.asteriskdocs.org/

6. Lead us to…

7. Another Example -- The Wiki Version – 600K

8. Another example – B2B Subscription

9. Last two Examples
 Lead us to using text mark up of AsciiDoc, much like a wiki mark-up
 Which lead to using Gollum on top of GitHub to manage versions
 The B2B part of Safari lead us to build something where we could have our
larger customers involved in creating, distributing and building community around
content. They are not all evil.

10. The Future of Technical Documentation
4,500 new
GitHub projects
a day

11. Does Social Coding help Documentation?
0.72%

12. Is it the Tooling Ecosystem?
 How many of us really like to use MS Word? Yet it has powerful features like a
good programming framework.
 How many use a text editor with plugins for languages. But are they really all you
need?
 How many use docBook or markDown?
 Anyone using a Wiki?
 Anyone use ASCIIDoc?
 We can use all of the above in a new platform sitting on-top of GitHub.

13. Our Future with Technical Documentation

14. Pull, fork and push your Documents

15. Github / Atlas

16. Distribution with Benefits