Communication Design Quarterly Mar 2017

Forum design and the changing landscape of crowd-sourced help information

Jordan Frith

Abstract

The help documentation landscape has changed with the growth of various forms of social media. People now post how-to videos to YouTube, they write crowdsourced documentation for open-source software, and they participate in and draw from a wide range of help forums. These forums are a form of crowdsourced help information in which experts and amateurs come together to address questions and explain materials. While these online forums can be thought of as a threat to the roles of technical communicators, they also present opportunities for professionals to adapt their skills to new roles as "community managers" of professionally sponsored forums. This article examines that point by showing how communication design is important for developing online help forum communities. Through the analysis of ethnographic and interview data, the article covers different areas of design important for understanding help forums as networked forms of technical communication.

Journal
Communication Design Quarterly
Published
2017-03-22
DOI
10.1145/3068698.3068700
CompPile
Search in CompPile ↗
Topics
writing across the curriculum multimodality social media technical communication place and space

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (3)

  1. Ranade et al. (2022)
    Infrastructural support of users' mediated potential
    Communication Design Quarterly
  2. Zhu et al. (2021)
    A machine learning algorithm for sorting online comments via topic modeling
    Communication Design Quarterly
  3. Cagle et al. (2019)
    Shades of denialism
    Communication Design Quarterly

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