Computing at work: empowering action by “low-level users”
Communications of the ACM
Using contextual inquiry to learn about your audiences
ACM SIGDOC Asterisk Journal of Computer Documentation
The wired neighborhood
Answer Garden 2: merging organizational memory with collaborative help
CSCW '96 Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Back to work: renewing old agendas for cooperative design
Computers and design in context
User-centered technology: a rhetorical theory for computers and other mundane artifacts
User-centered technology: a rhetorical theory for computers and other mundane artifacts
Genre ecologies: an open-system approach to understanding and constructing documentation
ACM Journal of Computer Documentation (JCD)
Open-source documentation: in search of user-driven, just-in-time writing
SIGDOC '01 Proceedings of the 19th annual international conference on Computer documentation
IPCC/SIGDOC '00 Proceedings of IEEE professional communication society international professional communication conference and Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM international conference on Computer documentation: technology & teamwork
Usability Testing and Research
Usability Testing and Research
A Practical Guide to Usability Testing
A Practical Guide to Usability Testing
Living design memory: framework, implementation, lessons learned
Human-Computer Interaction
Produsers and end users: how social media impacts our students' future research questions
Communication Design Quarterly Review
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Technical communicators have become increasingly interested in how to "open up" the documentation process - to encourage workers to participate in developing documentation that closely fits their needs. This goal has led technical communicators to engage in usability testing, user-centered design approaches, and, more recently, open source documentation. Although these approaches have all had some success, there are other ways to encourage the participatory citizenship that is implied in these approaches. One way is through an open systems approach in which workers can consensually modify a given system and add their own contributions to the system. That is, an open system consists of an officially designed core that provides openings for workers' contributions - a system of information in which the control and responsibility for the information are distributed among the users themselves. The open systems approach has implications for computer documentation, but also for other domains, since it moves us from a consumer model of documentation-as-product towards a citizenship model in which citizens contribute to and collaboratively develop information.In this presentation, I describe efforts at two different universities to develop departmental websites as open systems. At these sites, web developers have adapted techniques that have traditionally been used in web-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM), transforming the sites from closed systems (centrally maintained and controlled sites) to open systems in which control is distributed among participants. At both universities, the shift entails constructing frameworks in which faculty and staff participate can collaboratively develop websites. Finally, I discuss the implications for computer documentation systems.