This talk describes a process to extend and integrate support and documentation contributor communities

1. Coordinating Documentation and Support: Turning Complaints into Contributions Jennifer Zickerman, Mozilla Thunderbird [email_address] jenzed (IRC and Twitter)

3. Quality assurance

4. Support

5. Documentation (for users, for developers)

6. etc

8. Contributors: volunteers

9. Users

12. Quality assurance versus development

13. etc

15. Professional advancement / development

16. Community membership

17. Recognition

20. Similar audiences and contributor profile

21. Manage processes, platforms and people to make them interconnect

23. Too specific in their needs to understand

24. A cost, not an opportunity

26. Meta-analysis of support questions

27. Usability studies

28. How our cousin feels about things

31. Contributors: 50

33. Contributors: 50

34. Users: 10,000,000

36. Potential for support and documentation contributors, evangelism

37. “ Army of Awesome”

39. Manage expectations: “Community Support”

40. Encourage peer support

42. Learn about the “open” in open source (contribution)

43. Exponential

45. Open source is participatory

46. High-level technical skills not required

47. Everyone is welcome

48. Everyone can make a contribution

52. Convoluted discussions, hard to find the upshot

53. User support not seen as authoritative

54. Platform not optimized for information management

56. Edited

57. Maintained

58. Structured

60. Docs not glamorous - behind the scenes

62. Nintendo attention span

64. Focused on helping

65. Content is related and reusable

66. Support contributors are intimidated regarding contributing to documentation

68. Interlinking support issues and documentation articles improves search results

69. Both can bring people into an open source project

70. Engage people who do not generally consider themselves potential contributors

72. Professional development / experience

73. Recognition

74. Repay favor

75. Part of community

76. Part of a cool project

77. Idealism

79. Standard disclaimers, YMMV, not shown actual size, etc

81. Keywords / tags

82. Status / ratings

83. Easy to use - self-managing

86. Low barrier to entry

87. Searchable / sortable

88. Tags, types of articles

89. Authentication

90. Edit / validation

93. Ask thread contributors to create documentation

94. Tag / issue tracking

95. Round trip

97. Article requests / status

98. Links / round-tripping

99. List of needed articles

101. Editorial safety net

102. Personal contact; easy access to community and moderators

103. Corrections are constructive not critical

106. Public acknowledgement

108. Contributors rather than consumers