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Building bridges to customer needs in open source documentation

Published:04 October 2019Publication History

ABSTRACT

The Red Hat OpenShift documentation repository is situated in a unique open source environment in which anybody with a GitHub account can contribute directly to the documentation set. One of the primary contributors to the documentation repository are developers, which presents a challenge. The technical writers on the Red Hat OpenShift documentation team who collaboratively write, edit, and merge these contributions are faced with the challenge of maintaining user-centered rather than engineering- centered documentation. Furthermore, the technical writers lack direct interaction with external customers. Considering these challenges, this industry insight report discusses several methods that can be employed to maintain a customer-centric focus and improve the documentation set: focus on user stories, network with internal customers and stakeholders who work closest with external customers, and seek opportunities to work on customer cases.

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM Other conferences
        SIGDOC '19: Proceedings of the 37th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication
        October 2019
        308 pages
        ISBN:9781450367905
        DOI:10.1145/3328020

        Copyright © 2019 ACM

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 4 October 2019

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        SIGDOC '19 Paper Acceptance Rate85of105submissions,81%Overall Acceptance Rate355of582submissions,61%
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