Technically Speaking

I’m running for the office of Chapter President in the Intermountain chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. You can see my candidate statement on the IM-STC website.

Wish me luck!

As a technical writer, I develop content for the applications I’m supporting. Often that includes designing content, images, and multi-media to provide the best user experience possible. As content developers, however, we have a responsibility (both legal and moral) to ensure that the content we are using is being used properly and legally.

We live in a world with lots of avenues to get content for our projects. Several websites specialize in searching for media that you can download and use in your product. Just because you can find it, however, does not mean you can use it. There are legal requirements that you need to be aware of when you are using content created by somebody else.

For example, I can’t just do a Google image search and find any image and put it directly into my project. The person who created that image has copyright protection on that content. You can not use it unless you get a license to use it from the copyright holder.

When you are working on a project for personal use, you probably don’t have to be too worried about these restrictions. However, when you are doing work that will be used in any kind of professional setting or commercial setting, you have to be very careful how you use others’ intellectual property.

Take, for example, the case of NBC currently in the news. NBC is being sued for using somebody else’s intellectual property, without properly licensing it. A very similar thing happened at a company where I used to work. The company had been purchased by a larger entity, and was going through a re-branding. The new branding used a font that the company hadn’t licensed properly. When I read the license agreement and realized we were infringing on somebody’s IP rights, I escalated to the management, who had to pay tens of thousands of dollars to use the fonts the way they were planning to. However, paying those tens of thousands of dollars up front saved them potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in the lawsuit that might come from using the fonts illegally.

Since the work you create represents the company you work for (or your own company, if you are an contractor), you really need to pay attention to intellectual property issues to protect your company from being held liable for infringement.

Here are some tips for using intellectual property properly:

• When you use somebody’s material, be sure you get written permission to use it, including exactly how it will be used. If you are going to use it for commercial purposes, be sure that it is properly stated.
• Don’t just assume that people put the content on the Internet so it can be used.
• If you purchase stock photography, make sure you abide by the terms of the license agreement. Generally, you don’t purchase unlimited rights; normally your license restricts how the property can be used (if it can be downloaded, for example; or if it can be used on a T-shirt or mug).
• If you create something from scratch while at work, that work belongs to your employer. You can use that in your work product in any way you want. If you make a derivative work, you have to be sure you are licensed to do so.
• “Fair use” is a defense in court; it is not a legal protection, per se. Be very careful about saying “I can use this, because it is ‘fair use.’” You don’t want to get sued to prove that it is, in fact, fair use. When in doubt, don’t do it.
• Track your IP use. Many licenses to use IP include time restrictions; after a certain date you have to re-pay to continue to use the image. Be sure your organization is in compliance with these rules.
• When you use somebody else’s work, be sure you give proper attribution. In many cases it is required. In other cases, it is just the morally right thing to do.

A special note about Creative Commons License

There are lots of images available out there under a Creative Commons license. There are several forms of this license, but you need to be very careful if you use Creative Commons-licensed material because most Creative Commons licenses require “share-alike.” That means that if you use an image licensed with a Creative Commons license, your entire project must also be licensed under the same license.

That means if you are creating a help system that includes a single Creative Commons Share Alike image, then your entire help system may also be required to be licensed under a Creative Commons Share Alike license.

Watching out for others’ IP rights is good for the community. It means you can also expect your IP rights to be respected. It is the responsible thing for us to do, and as writers, we owe it to ourselves, our employers, and our community to make sure we are in compliance with intellectual property requirements.

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Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this should not be considered legal advice. If you have questions about intellectual property issues, please seek the advice of an IP attorney licensed to practice in your locality.

As  a “young” technical writer, I thought I might share some of my feelings on the STC crisis.

First, a little background on me. I knew while I was in college that I wanted to be a technical writer after graduation. I switched to an English major for that purpose, and picked classes that gave me a “technical communication emphasis”. I joined STC while I was in college because I wanted to connect with people in my field. I got a chapter scholarship to attend a regional STC conference, and had a great time meeting people who did for a living what I was studying.

When I graduated and began working, I joined STC as a regular member. For two of my three jobs, I had to explain to my employer what the “STC” bullet meant on my resume. Until my current job, I’ve never had an employer who would pay for conferences, so my interactions with STC have been limited to those in the local chapter, on the web, and through STC publications. I believe herein lies the problem that STC faces: STC’s value proposition has to be able to compete with what I can obtain from other sources, and do so in a compelling way.

I look at it this way: if the STC were to go away, what would I lose? Let’s take a look at the benefits that I care about that I’d lose:

• STC publications. I like receiving Intercom. I honestly don’t really ever read Technical Communication. I get the need for a peer-reviewed journal, and understand how this is especially important in academia, but the stuff in TC generally doesn’t seem to interest or affect me. But the reality is that most of the articles that are published in Intercom would get published in other forms (like blogs). They might not be on the same subject, but the information is out there, and will continue to be churned out by writers like my colleague Tom Johnson who are better bloggers than I. So, if the publications go away, I’ll miss them a little bit, but not a lot.
• Local chapter affiliation. I’ve not been very active in my local chapter until the last couple of months. I’ve attended a couple of meetings in the 5 years that I’ve been a member, but let’s be honest: like any professional, I’ve got lots of things competing for my time and attention. I have a young family that I really enjoy spending time with. When STC meetings conflict with personal interests, I’ve picked personal over professional because I haven’t seen tons of value in the local chapter. My perspective on that is changing as I’ve accepted a VP position in my local chapter, and I hope that as an executive team, we can find ways to make our local chapter more useful to the technical communicators in our region. Six months ago, I considered not being affiliated with a local chapter, but now I’m finding more value there. Maybe this is a resource like so many others that you get out of it what you put into it.
• SIG / STC online affiliations. The SIGs haven’t been really useful to me. I’m a member of one SIG that has never contacted me with information about the SIG; has never provided any information about lists I might join, nor provided any other benefit. The other SIG has a mailing list, but it isn’t the most active list I follow, and the questions that get posted to that list might as well be posted to other non-STC lists I follow. I’ve watched some STC community leaders create other online sites that don’t restrict their membership to STC members, but they promote these sites to STC members. I think STC loses value in these cases, because I might as well join the other groups (for free) than pay to be a member of STC.
• Salary survey. The salary survey on STCs website is now a complete joke, and I find it useless. I preferred the old method of self-reporting. While less accurate, I found it much more helpful than the current salary survey. I won’t miss this resource at all because I don’t use it. There are several salary websites I can use that provide as much, if not more, value than the STC salary survey.
• Job resources on STC websites. The jobs section of the Society web site has not been a useful tool for me. When I’ve been looking for jobs, there haven’t been any local listings. When I went to post a job, there was an additional $120 fee, which my employer wouldn’t pay because they were already listing on Dice and Monster. The irony is that we were able to post on the local chapter website for free, and the writer we hired found us through the local chapter listing. So without STC’s local chapter website, we wouldn’t have found that writer, but it’s not like there aren’t other job boards that tech writers and their employers are using.

So here is my question: if STC is going to remain a viable organization, what is going to be the value proposition? What will STC provide that I can’t get from other sources? And then I have to ask, how much is that worth to me? I hope STC focuses on what I can’t get elsewhere and does it in a way that is valuable and interesting. That is what will keep me, a “young” writer interested in the organization.

Twitter is an interesting tool. In case you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard of it, Twitter is a social networking tool that lets you share updates (or tweets) with the world. People can subscribe to your twitter feed, and will see your tweets (mixed in with the tweets of anybody else they follow). The limitation, though, is that an individual tweet must be 140 characters or shorter.

I follow lots of technical communicators and increasingly I’m seeing people reach out for help on the software they are using. That is really cool in some ways. I follow several writers, and I know several writers follow me. If I’m having trouble with a piece of software, I can pose a quick question, and one of my followers might have the answer I need.

There is a limitation, though. Since an individual post is limited to 140 characters, it is hard to give a detailed description of the problem I’m experiencing, and it is likewise difficult for somebody responding to give a detailed description of the possbile solutions. While technical communicators generally prefer brevity, you must be able to at least be comprehensive.

Today one of the people I follow asked a question about MadCap Flare and wanted to understand the conceptual difference between togglers, drop-downs, expanding text, and pop-up text, and wanted to know what the use cases were. I don’t mean to pick on this person, but it provides a good example for an issue I’ve been thinking about for some time now. See, I know quite a bit about these four features in Flare, and can provide a good explanation with use cases are. The trouble is, how can I do that in 140 characters?

Even if I dedicated a separate tweet to each of the four features, I’m still quite limited in what I can say, and how can I provide an adequate explanation and use case in such a short space? Plus, if I were to dedicate four tweets, I begin to clutter up my twitter feed responding to a single Twitter user, which is bad form and carries on a coversation that most of my followers probaby aren’t interested in.

I’ve seen several Flare users get product support from MadCap employees using Twitter, and I think that is nice for a quick question with an easy solution. Twitter, however, is not a great format for a detailed question that required specific exampled and detailed answers. In such cases, the best solution is probably to go to a related email list or forum where you can ask the question in enough detail that experienced users can provide helpful results.

Twitter can be a great tool, and can help people get answers quickly. However, when you have a question and need an answer, you probably ought to consider your question, and determine what channel is best suited for the type of answer you need. That may or may not be Twitter.

TechSmith corporation has released an update to Jing, the free screen capture/video capture tool. I ranted in January about a code change in that release that really bugged me. TechSmith responded here on my blog, and via e-mail, and today’s update addresses that issue (thank you TechSmith!) but introduces a couple more issues for me. But lets take them one at a time.

First, my original complaint with the January update was that when you created videos with small pixel dimensions (because you don’t want to capture the whole screen), when somebody tries to view the video directly (not embedded in a web page), the video expanded to the full screen.

This was a problem for me because one of the VPs in my company has a 30″ screen. If I’ve grabbed a video of a bug that happens in our software, and attach it to the bug report, when the VP tries to view the video of the bug, it is expanded something like 10x its captured size, which is hard to follow and looks terrible.

The release of Jing I installed today fixes that issue! Now when you directly view a Jing SWF file (say it is attached to the bug and the developer clicks on it to view it), small videos don’t expand to the width of the screen. Large videos do, but I can’t figure out where the breaking point is. And frankly, I’m okay with that. It was my small videos (in terms of pixel dimensions) that I was concerned about. So, a big thank you to TechSmith for listening and taking swift action on this issue.

My only gripes, and these are minor, are that first,  I wish the control bar that is added to the SWF file was placed below the capture region, instead on top of the bottom part of the capture region. Take this video for example.

Is there a reason that the controls cover up the bottom part of the captured image? If so, you ought to warn us that the bottom part won’t be visible, so we know to grab a taller portion.

My second gripe is that when I updated to the latest version, Jing lost all my button customizations. I had created several buttons to directly FTP content to my web server in a particular folder, or other buttons to save files on the network share in a specific folder. I’m going to have to remember what those were and re-create the buttons. In the first place, Jing shouldn’t have deleted these, and in the second place, if Jing really needed to delete these when it upgraded, it should have warned me first so that I was at least aware that I was going to lose my user-configured settings.

However, when I updated my second computer, these settings were saved. So there is a chance that this was user error, because for one computer it works like I want it to, but for the other one, it deleted my custom buttons. Ah well.

So my final review in a nutshell: great update, especially if you capture small pixel dimension videos. Great job TechSmith. Be aware, however, that the upgrade *might* totally erase all your custom buttons. Probably it won’t. Unless you do whatever it was I did. Anyway, thanks TechSmith!