As a result of implementing the practices of taking 15 minutes a day to innovate (OK, maybe a little longer), I happened upon a few articles that caught my attention as related to our quest to reinvent the document. With the economic news being what it is, we are clearly not the only ones thinking about the “next best thing” for our industry. Allow me to introduce these topics for your reading pleasure:
- Anne Gentle suggests a number of strategies for us to either keep our fingers on the pulse or to dictate the pulse of technical writing/producing/communicating/community’ing or however else you want to help people to understand the technical information that they need to do what they want. The links in the article could take some time to go through but are clearly central to our search for improving our services.
- Tom Johnson relates the story of a writer turned video producer whose tranformation occured… almost 5 years ago. We have been talking about video as an innovation. Well, clearly that ship has already set sail. It’s not too late to join the crew and make a difference with that technology, but when is the next cruise and where will it go?
- In an more general approach to innovation, Alice Rawsthorn writes on nytimes.com that innovating innovations has already been innovated with many innovative results. What I get from this article is that innovation cannot just be done for its own sake. The real key is to find what people need and give it to them.
I would like to add one other point. I agree with the sentiment that we, technical communicators located in Israel, have a value that cannot be overshadowed by our colleagues in any other location, be it the US, India, South Africa or [name one]. I would like to encourage local practitioners to follow and comment on the more popular blogs in our field. This small effort can improve our understanding of what is going on in the rest of the world and hopefully develop new ideas that we can implement.
!חג שמח
Recent Comments