This weekend I attended the OpenHelp Conference in Cincinnati. Unfortunately, I was only able to go to one day of it, as we had to be back for something Sunday morning.

It was smallish, and so there was a lot of good conversation and brainstorming.

The focus was both documentation and support, which are, of course, deeply intertwingled. It gave me a lot to think about, and I really wish I could have been there for the second day as well.

Siobhan McKeown, from the WordPress documentation team, was at the conference, and took amazing notes, so I’m going to link to her writeup for each talk.

The day started with Jorge Castro talking about using StackExchange to handle the Question & Answer part of support.StackExchange is part of the StackOverflow family of sites, Each StackExchange site is focused on a particular community, and is very focused on Question and Answer format, rather than general discussion. It allows users to vote for the quality of questions and answers, and seems to be a great way to get the subject matter experts more directly involved in the support process.

Siobhan’s notes are here.

Following that, Michael Verdi, from the Firefox support team, talked about the SuMo site and the work that they had done to help users find the answers to their question. Of particular interest was some graphs he showed of the improvement in customer satisfaction, as well as the rate of answered questions, brought about by just improving the search functionality, to help users find the right docs so that they didn’t even need to ask their question.

Firefox has their own home-grown, but Open Source, solution, called Kitsune. It has some StackExchage-like features, and also has a great tool called Army of Awesome, which is a way to watch Twitter mentions of your project/product, and ensure that at least one person from the expert community has responded to each one.

Here’s Siobhan’s notes.

This was followed by a panel discussion including Jorge, Michael, Jeremy Garcia (LinuxQuestions.org, and Siko Bouterse from Wikipedia. The discussion ranged from Wikipedia author retention to further discussion of many of the issues that Michael and Jorge had raised.

I spoke next, talking about listening to your audience. This is something I’ve thought a lot about over the years. My trepidation in speaking at this conference was that it seems like many of the people there know a lot more about documentation and support than I do, as I’m largely self-taught in this area. But it seemed that my remarks were well received. Once again here’s Siobhan’s notes, which in this case are way better than my own notes for my talk.

I was the last speaker of the day, and this was followed by a general discussion of the things that had been raised during the day, as well as many related issues.

You can see a lot of commentary about the events of the day, and of Sunday, by looking at the #openhelp keyword on Twitter. I’m looking forward to reading Siobhan’s notes from Sunday’s sessions.