Documentation is an onerous task that very few engineers (read geeks) will willingly do. It requires discipline, patience and time to prepare readable and usable documents. Traditional use of documentation tools like a WIKI or CMS place constraints on the documenter to follow style and structure guidelines that may make sense to management but absolutely no sense to geeks.
A lot of technical documentation is often created and lost on whiteboards and cubicle shout-outs. Such documentation rarely gets captured on a traditional document site due to the constraints outlined above.
I propose using Twitter and Moblog in the enterprise as a facilitator for documentation. Most geeks today have smartphones and are comfortable writing short text messages and taking pictures or videos on their cellphones. Here's how I envision using Twitter and Moblog for documentation:
1. Whenever there is a whiteboarding session, the engineers take pictures and upload to the internal Moblog/Twitter site. And, when there is a shout-out they tweet their brains out and dump them onto an enterprise twitter site. Even better, they start the shout-out on Twitter.
2. People within the organization can start following the tweeters and mobloggers that they trust and rely upon.
3. We could even throw in some Facebook "Like" or Digg "Digg It" features for followers to rate the posts.
4. Based on the number of followers and ratings each engineer has, a professional documentation team could port the posts of the most followed engineers into a traditional documentation system.
The process outlined above can be extended to communicating project status and team huddles instead of emails in overflowing inboxes.
Here are some links to explore if you think this post makes sense..
Moblog:camera phone mobile blogging community
Yours truly on Twitter
List of Enterprise Microblogging Tools
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