Freely you have received, freely give – Part 4

My team is here: TWIN team. When I say “team”, I refer to the people who stayed on. I had assumed a drop rate of 20%; it was actually 50%. Other assumptions went wrong too (in hindsight, they were presumptions not assumptions ); the lessons I learnt are:

• Volunteer work needs tremendous commitment because it is unpaid and voluntary. Do not expect everyone to have equal levels of commitment. Make allowances. Give the team goalposts they will meet, not what I think they should meet.
• Guard against people who, saying they’re my well-wishers, try to dissuade me from doing what I think is right. Especially against people who dissuade me because the perceived “returns” are non-existent. Develop a sense of detachment even while being attached. Hmm, where’s my Gita?
• Teams, especially as intelligent and experienced as this one, work well when there’s transparency. Give them reasons for why things are done the way I want them done, encourage feedback, and act on suggestions I think are good..

By the end of five months, we had mined about five years’ of posts. I sensed the team was getting a bit tired. Maybe I was pushing them too much. I suggested to Guru (and he agreed) if we could bring out an interim volume – something to show the world, and something to lift my team’s spirits with.

So you have the TWIN eBook Volume 1 (~1 MB) in front of you.

To read the file:

Download the CHM file to your local system.

In Windows Explorer, select the CHM file and right-click.

Click Properties >> Unblock >> Apply.

Open the CHM file.

At the moment, the format is CHM. I know that’s non-ideal and I am still thinking…In my next post, I’ll talk about future plans what’s next.

Freely you have received, freely give – Part 3

So, did it work?

Yes. Like a dream. Neeta said several weeks later, “…no phone calls or video conferencing, and yet it all works! It is a pleasure to be associated…with the project”.

Because pictures speak more than words, here are some…

guidelines

[caption id="attachment_114" align="alignnone" width="450" caption="categories"][/caption]

allotments

[caption id="attachment_117" align="alignnone" width="450" caption="metrics1"][/caption]

metrics2

[caption id="attachment_119" align="alignnone" width="450" caption="scrum"][/caption]

And, who are these people who made this all happen. Next post

Freely you have received, freely give – Part 2

While waiting for people to volunteer, I started thinking about the execution…

What is the project size

1. Authoring: As of Jun 8, there are 36535 messages.  Assuming 10% of the messages are job postings, 33000 messages to sift through.  Assuming one message takes 1 minute to read, and another minute to do a basic copy-paste if the message is useful, it is 30 messages per hour.  Or, 1100 hours.
2. Reviewing: 50% of the effort at step 1. So, 550 hours.
3. Correcting: 10% of the effort at step 1.  110 hours.
4. Production: 10% of the effort at step 1.  110 hours.

Total: 1870 hours.

If we get 10 people dedicated enough to put in 5 hours every week, this takes 38 weeks.  Looks do-able at the moment.

What process do we follow

1. Take up discrete chunks of posts, say, one month or two months.
2. Ignore useless posts.
3. For useful posts, copy-paste the question into a category. If the question has several answers, copy-paste ALL the answers (with the name and email of the answerer, and the date of the answer post).
4. Begin the review process after a year’s posts are mined.
5. Decide later about handling corrections and doing the production.

Action items

• Prepare guidelines for what is useless, what is useful.
• List the categories.
• Prepare guidelines for what goes into each category.
• Prepare a template in which to copy-paste the stuff.
• Prepare guidelines for doing the review.

What tools do we use

• Authoring: Multi-author, multi-location project, so use a free, Web-based content management system. How about Googledocs?
• Production: Compiled online help (in a CHM format) is easiest but runs only on Windows. Think….
• Project Management: Hmm. Spreadsheets.

Web is a cloud, so baseline the GoogleDocs stuff every third day on an external media (get myself some rewrite-able CDs). Keep reminding people to NOT work on their local machines.

What challenges do I foresee

• People may drop off once they realise the enormity of the commitment needed from them.
  

  Do nothing. What can be done? Assume a 20% drop-out rate and rework the schedule.

• The team is virtual. No one knows the other.
  

  • Create a virtual teamroom; ask them to introduce themselves and talk to each other.
  • Create a scrum_space. Absolutely forbid people from emailing me directly. All stuff is to be dealt ONLY on the scrum_page.

• The work is new.
  

  • Draw up a “required things” list for team.
  • Share the guidelines, the template, and the workspaces.
  • Do a test-run with, say, 50 posts and be around round-the-clock to respond to teething problems.

Freely you have received, freely give – Part 1

TWIN (Technical Writers of India) is the first mailing list of Indian technical writers.  It was born in 1997.   Like any other mailing list, it is a coffee shop where people come to ask questions, post answers, share information, et cetera.  Posts to the mailing list are archived; the TWIN archives, like the TWIN mailing list, has free access.

By 2008, the TWIN archives had more than 35000 posts (growing daily).  The treasure trove was no longer as searchable as you and I would have liked it to be.  Gururaj is the current owner of the mailing list.  He asked me if I could drive a project to harvest the archives and collect the useful information into a searchable repository. I said, Yes. And sat down to think…

• Data source: 35000 posts which can be sorted according to date, author, or subject.
• Expected output: Question bank, searchable.
• Expected release date: December 2008, which gives me just about six months
• Resources: Nil. TWIN does not employ paid workers, does not have its own money, does not own computers.
• Processes: Undefined. No one has done this before (AFAIK).

What should I do? These, I thought:

• Get people
• Arrange infrastructure
• Do job
• Deliver

Get people, hmmm?  This was a project that needed people who could commit a certain number of hours every week, but not because they are paid to do so.  So, I advertised for volunteers.  For people whom I could offer nothing except toils, and sweat.  And Matthew 10:8.

I sent a mail to the TWIN list, and gave a two-week deadline. What happened next is what I’ll cover in my posts (Parts 2, 3, 4, …) over the next few days.

Comparing Blogger.com and WordPress.com

For the past few weeks, I have been comparing the free blogging facilities offered by Blogger.com and WordPress.com.

First, the similarities:

• Both are free.
• Both have fairly easy-to-use Web user interfaces.
• Both let you create private blogs and limited-access blogs.
• Both allow readers to post comments; both allow comment moderation and spam control.
• Both allow a single user ID to have multiple blogs.
• Both allow blogs to have multiple authors.
• Both let you display your tag counts: Blogger calls them “Labels” and WordPress calls them “tags”.

Now, the differences.

Where Blogger scrores:

• Blogger lets you add javascript to your pages. Because WordPress does not, you may not be able to add to your blog third-party widgets that use javascript.
• Blogger lets you customise the CSS of your blog. Because WordPress does not, you are limited by their themes; as a consolation, you can change the picture in the header of their themes. Also, because WordPress themes cannot be customised, you cannot add third-party javascript to the CSS. Google Analytics, for example, needs you to add a code snippet in the CSS.
• Blogger lets you analyse your blog through Google Analytics. Because WordPress has only a stat tool, it’s analytical potential is limited only to the number of visits to your blog.

Where WordPress scores:

• WordPress lets you add Pages (in addition to Posts). Pages are static (unlike posts, which keep changing according to your “Recent posts” settings). And Pages, if you choose the correct theme, appear as tabs at the top of your blog screen. WordPress, thus, offers you a combination of a journal (of posts) and a notebook (of pages). The workaround I could think for Blogger is: Add a text gadget to the sidebar, and put your page text into it. Not a very elegant workaround if the content of your page is something on the lines of, say, “Frequently asked questions”.
• WordPress lets you nest pages. This is my favourite feature – it gives me an almost TOC-like facility for the blog.
• WordPress lets you control who can see individual pages. This control is in addition to the blog-level access control.
• WordPress lets you import the contents from another blog; even a non-WordPress one.
• WordPress lets you put the spotlight on your blog visitors; it has a “Recent Comments” widget
• WordPress lets you highlight your most popular posts through a “Top Posts” widget. The workaround I could think for Blogger is: Add a text gadget to the sidebar, and enter the posts you think are top (through your Google Analytics data).
• WordPress lets you add tag your posts into categories; so, you have two levels of tagging – one as tags and another as categories. You can have clouds for both on your blog. Blogger has only labels.

An ideal blogging solution according to me would be any of the following:

• Blogger + Page-like feature + multi-tagging of posts + Recent-comments widget + Top-posts widget + Page-level access control
• WordPress + Google-Analytics-like features + javascript functionality

But hey! Am I asking too much? The product in question is supposed to be a blog, not a Web domain.