Kunal Bhatia
@kunalslab · Co-founder & Design Lead @SlidesUp
Technical writing, especially as a designer has been a tough one to deal with. At my last job, we used Confluence for internal docs and published a static site from GitHub for external docs. That was just for the design + product + engineering teams. We also had dedicated technical writers, technical sales people, etc. They had their own set of tools.
One problem we had was keeping everyone in sync with the changes. How might you enable conversations with Corilla?
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David Ryan
@davedri · Founded Corilla. Red Hat & NUMA alumnus.
@kunalslab I feel you! Although in itself, multiple tools across an organisation aren't a bad thing, it becomes a mask for enormous opportunity cost when the marketing team, the support team, the sales team and the technical writers are all authoring their own content in their own workflows.
This is something we think a lot about, and it's a trend we're already seeing inside of Corilla. Our technical writing community started as beta users, became advocates in their organisation, got their developers hooked on the ease of collaborative Markdown in the same version controlled environment as the writers, and then... the marketing teams took notice.
Most of us on the dev side of things have used some form of VCS for years (e.g. I still have "svn up, svn st, svn up, svn st" PTSD!), but making designers and marketers use GitHub is noble in its intentions, but it's not the kind of intuitive workflow that actually inspires highly active use. So we weren't too surprised when we saw beta users from non-technical marketing teams using Corilla as a "staging ground" for their "approved" design and marketing assets. We made VCS easy.
The challenge is how we, as you rightly point out, enable the conversation around them. I have a personal interest in a Slack bot for Corilla (@nathan404 isn't a fan 😭) that would at least lower a few more barriers between dominant communication patterns and the exposure/engagement of content in the repo. But beyond that we're open to ideas.
Let's say we make the content discovery super effective (and I can sense our friends from Algolia reading this right now!), and nail the user privs (in a way that Confluence really hasn't)... what would help facilitate the conversation around that content?
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Kunal Bhatia
@kunalslab · Co-founder & Design Lead @SlidesUp
@davedri that would certainly help. Some way to discover and follow relevant types of content + conversation would be my Holy Grail. Privacy could be just as simple as internal vs. external for now.
I jumped to a Slack integration as a solution in my head at first too. Curious—why does @nathan404 think that's not a good idea?
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David Ryan
@davedri · Founded Corilla. Red Hat & NUMA alumnus.
@kunalslab I think it's because @nathan404 doesn't like me having fun 😤
That and how we run our engineering and product pipelines. We all come from an enterprise background, but have all worked in or founded startups. Which means we've seen the damage a rogue CEO can have on jamming features in or demanding engineering ships whatever is shiny that week.
At the moment we've got some major updates to the documentation portal, our import and export API, editorial tooling, team reporting and advanced analysis, etc. The Slack bot is in our Kanban's Triage column, but it doesn't make it through the weekly stack rank when we negotiate in the Backlog.
As a company we're super transparent with our users both how we work and what we're working on. And I can say I've just not being able to justify the Slackbot as a focus just yet, but I'm tempted to do a little weekend hackathon personally and it would make sense to open source it (with Corilla as just one of the API options).
If that sounds interesting to anyone reading, I'd be happy to make a little bounty or work on it collaboratively (again, that Red Hat and community DNA is at our core).
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Kunal Bhatia
@kunalslab · Co-founder & Design Lead @SlidesUp
@davedri @nathan404 thanks for the insights into this! I like your style :)
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Nathan Koch
@nathan404 · CTO, Corilla
Thanks @kunalslab. @davedri covered it pretty well but I just wanted to my thoughts as well. For me it really comes down to focus, and I believe for small teams that focus is incredibly important. We have lots of really fun and interesting ideas (some even a little bit crazy 😉) in the pipeline and the hardest bit is working out what we should focus on.
It's not that I'm against the idea of Slack integration (or other integrations), but that there are other core features that we need to focus on for the time being. We spend a lot of time in Slack and I must admit there are times that I wish we had Slack integration (don't tell David I just admitted that).
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