ccr 760: on hart-davidson, et al

I like this paper because it’s based on practicality – on specific activities required in specific situations. Maybe it’s the case-study approach and the lens of phronesis that makes the conclusions usable and practical.

Content management as an activity (or “a type of conduct”) is understood, I think, by most practicing technical communicators. What the authors do well in this paper is present two situations in which the activity is shared by a range of workers who create knowledge, arrange information and make texts. It is this common decentralized activity that makes it extremely difficult to get a “culture of content management” to stick. It’s the problem of herding cats – cats that have their own thoughts (and competencies) regarding the ways information is created, published, and distributed.

In some ways, I think the authors’ conclusions have already been taken up by CMS developers – particularly by web content management system developers. Allowing users to “become more than just consumers, but also actual creators, editors, and manipulators of content" (26) is exactly what allows an organization to create and shape a culture of content (see Justin’s comments below for a great example). This is the empowering activity (phronesis) that allows CMS users to respond to highly contextualized real world situations that require specific work (world?) experiences.

In terms of actionable items based on lesson learned in both case studies, the authors give us a space in which to ask content-specific questions that do not necessarily shift the authority of meaning making solely to the technical communicator. Similarly, the authors ground their conclusions on an honest assessment of their own consulting activities: "But for many other organizations, writing practices are not so obvious and nowhere near the list of mission-critical activities. This means that our expertise, too, is off the radar screen. This is why it is true, we would argue, that while the moment of coming to content management may well give us an opportunity to prove ourselves valuable, we also need to be careful to develop sustainable ways of coming to content management that can make writing work visible and accountable as part of an organization’s thinking" (32). If you’ve had a chance to meet and listen to Bill Hart-Davidson, you’d recognize his voice and pragmatism in the preceding passage.