Cultivating Biological Documentation

Information delivery doesn’t stop at your end product, source code, internal knowledge bases, or even docs sites. ‘Biological documentation’ — the knowledge possessed by individuals on a team or in a community — is also an important part of the picture. This knowledge is used to create and maintain software and written documentation, but it is also used in ways that supplement written documentation, such as providing customer support, giving internal training, or speaking at events.

Maintaining biological documentation requires different considerations than written documentation. For example, biological documentation cannot be written, reviewed, and published; it is developed continuously through training and other knowledge transfer opportunities.

Transcript

1. Cultivating Biological Documentation Juliana Arrighi juliana@newrelic.com @juliuliana
2. What is the purpose of writing documentation?
4. Challenges of working with bio docs
5. Persistent write, compose, publish, push read, run review, proofread, test edit, restructure, rewrite, refactor subject to review processes, version control, etc Biological train, instruct, mentor, demo, transfer knowledge converse, ask assess, evaluate unlearn, relearn, make new connections subject to memory and conflicting knowledge, no version control
6. My challenge for you... There will be a test.
7. Coming up... Building fertile ground for planting seeds of knowledge Building culture for self-propagating knowledge
8. Plant the Seeds Tools for fertile learning
9. Appeal to multiple learner styles Stories Figures Questions Projects Goals Self-direction Competition Collaboration Interaction Verbal Visual Kinesthetic
10. Appeal to multiple learner styles Stories Figures Questions Projects Goals Self-direction Competition Collaboration Interaction Verbal Visual Kinesthetic
11. Appeal to multiple learner styles Stories Figures Questions Projects Goals Self-direction Competition Collaboration Interaction Verbal Visual Kinesthetic
12. Engage Prior Knowledge
13. Incorporate Doing Have a secret mission
14. Consistent, expressive language
15. Set expectations Don’t forget to address ‘why?’
16. Check Off and Check In
17. Propagate Knowledge. Build a culture of learning.
18. Know Your Information Network
19. Find time to get people talking
20. Share what you learned Make it easy to contribute Cultivate Confidence
21. I really wasn’t joking about the test.