Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct

Commitment to ethical professional conduct is expected of every member (voting members, associate members, and student members) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). This Code, consisting of 24 imperatives formulated as statements of personal responsibility, identifies the elements of such a commitment. It contains many, but not all, issues professionals are likely to face.

ACM (1992). Articles>Computing>Professionalism>Ethics

Technical Communication Degrees for the 21st Century    

The practice of technical communication, especially for professionals just entering the workplace, is rapidly changing. Companies have higher expectations for degrees in technical communication, a strong foundation in technology, and the ability to function on cross-disciplinary teams alongside technical experts in the design and development process. As the practice of technical communication shifts its focus, academics have the responsibility to be certain that technical communication degree programs have a strong component of such topics as engineering design, programming, human factors, usability, instructional design, and project management, in addition to traditional communication skills. Academic programs have lagged behind practice, largely due to the location of degree programs, departmental reward systems, faculty deficiencies in technology, little depth in fields beyond rhetoric, and lack of exposure to best industry practices. This paper addresses these issues and makes some practical recommendations for catching academe up to practice.

David, Marjorie T. ACM SIGDOC (2000). Articles>Education>TC

Toward 2^W, Beyond Web 2.0  

From its inception as a global hypertext system, the Web has evolved into a universal platform for deploying loosely coupled distributed applications. As we move toward the next-generation Web platform, the bulk of user data and applications will reside in the network cloud. Ubiquitous access results from interaction delivered as Web pages augmented by JavaScript to create highly reactive user interfaces. This point in the evolution of the Web is often called Web 2.0. In predicting what comes after Web 2.0--what I call 2^W, a Web that encompasses all Web-addressable information--I go back to the architectural foundations of the Web, analyze the move to Web 2.0, and look forward to what might follow.

Raman, T.V. Communications of the ACM (2009). Articles>Web Design>Interaction Design

Content Management and the Production of Genres    

In this paper, I suggest that granularized content management introduces as-yet-unexplored issues to genres of technical communication. I argue that content management, while it can, as advertised, free content and make it easy to reuse that content in multiple genres, that flexibility can create new problems for genres and genre systems, leading to problematic reuse, inflexible genre systems, rigid and proprietary genres, and uncritical internationalization.

Clark, Dave. ACM SIGDOC (2007). Articles>Content Management>Genre>Localization

Pragmatic DITA on a Budget  

A small documentation team working on a tight budget can now use the tool ecosystem enabled by the DITA standard to create the sophisticated content that previously required long and expensive projects. The author spent just nine person-weeks over three years to replace a custom XML system with a DITA system based on a combination of off-the-shelf software, authoring conventions, and custom scripts.

Baptista, Joaquim. ACM SIGDOC (2008). Articles>Documentation>DITA>Case Studies

Agile Documentation with uScrum  

uScrum (uncertainty Scrum) is an agile process developed by a small team at Altitude Software to manage the process of writing user documentation. uScrum manages uncertainty and the unknown, allowing writers to quickly react to changing conditions. uScrum uses orders of ignorance to understand the difficulty of tasks, allowing the team to effectively prioritize regular work together with difficult creative work.

Baptista, Joaquim. ACM SIGDOC (2008). Articles>Documentation>Agile>Scrum