2010 Networking Happy Hour

Google Analytics to Track Web-Based Documentation Usage

by Bob Zebian, STC member

An ongoing question for information professionals is “Just how do users use our documentation?” There are several methods to help determine this, such as setting up use case scenarios or electronic customer feedback, but while these have some value, they are also somewhat artificial. What is needed is a tool that tells you what topics users are reading, how long are they reading, and how they navigate to the information they need

Web analytic tools can provide this type of data for technical information that is accessed through the Web. Even though most Web analytic tools are designed for marketing use, they can also provide valuable information for technical communicators.

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Interorganizational Cooperation

by Arroxane Eber, LSC President

If you looked around any room at the STC Technical Summit, you would probably see members of the Usability Professionals Association (UPA), Interaction Design Association (IXDA), American Society of Training & Development (ASTD), and several other professional groups. No rule has prevented a professional from participating in numerous organizations. Perhaps you, yourself, have attended a conference or presentation by an organization other than STC.

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My Last LSC Editor's Column

by Jackie Damrau

My time has come to turn the reins of the LSC Technically Write over to someone else. With my recent move to the state of Washington, my time is being consumed by work, other family life events, and starting in January 2011, the STC International Summit Awards.

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November: Overcoming Obstacles When Moving to an Agile Environment

by Doug Dow, Associate Fellow

A small crowd of twenty-some Lone Star members bypassed the camping tents, climbed the stairs, made their way past racks of discount sporting gear, and found the REI Sporting Goods Store’s community room to hear Ravi Verma speak on preparing teams for the transition to Agile development methodologies.

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From Our President

When was the last time you got something for nothing? How about a free professional course, workshop, or training session? Okay, you do have to give something to get a little help with professional development: you have to submit an application. That's it. No, really.

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The Manhole Mystery at Fort Sam Houston

by Paula Robertson, Member

Ed.: A different version of this article was previously published (pp. 14-15) in the September/October 2010 issue of Public Works Digest.

Have you ever wondered what you would find under the lid of a manhole? While hardly noticeable, embedded in the streets that we drive over, sanitary sewer manholes provide more than an inconspicuous clue to the utility system concealed beneath. They are the only accessible means to begin exploration of a complex system that is vital to the health of troops and civilians who embody the missions at our nation’s military installations.

The Base Realignment and Closure Act (BRAC) of 2005 recommended the expansion of Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, to become the premier medical training complex for the U.S. Department of Defense. The consolidation and relocation of multiple service branches’ medical training activities to Fort Sam Houston would mean a significant increase in on-site population, greatly expanded missions, and improved medical care to the military community. As part of an initiative to analyze the current infrastructure and its capacity to support the expansion, in 2007 the Fort Sam Houston Directorate of Public Works (FSH DPW) contracted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Worth District, to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the water utilities at Fort Sam Houston.

The Comprehensive Infrastructure Studies included storm water, water distribution, and wastewater collection system assessments. As technical editor of the reports that documented the findings and recommendations for two of these studies, the most interesting to me was the Fort Sam Houston Wastewater Collection System Study, which delved into the mysterious underworld of the sanitary sewer system.

For the Wastewater Collection System Study, Fort Worth District engineers conducted a Sanitary Sewer Evaluation Survey (SSES). The typical SSES includes the following component tasks:

• Assessment of the lift stations, which pump wastewater uphill to the collection system of pipes, or mainlines
• Manhole inventory and assessment
• Wastewater flow monitoring
• Mainline inventory and assessment
• GPS surveying, to update or create an accurate GIS map of the collection system components
• Development and analysis of a Hydraulic Model of the collection system, based on all the data collected in previous tasks

Wastewater flow monitoring is one of the early activities of the SSES, typically done while collecting the manhole inventory data. Thus we begin to uncover the mystery, peering straight into a manhole and even crawling down inside, thanks to the images captured by our third-party contractors.

Go with the Flow Monitoring

The Fort Sam Houston Wastewater Collection System consists of roughly 232,000 linear feet of gravity sewer mainline and 1,060 manholes. Much of the system was built in the 1930s and has far exceeded its 50-year design life. As stated in the Fort Sam Houston Sanitary Sewer Evaluation Survey Temporary Flow Monitoring Report (February 2009), “Extraneous water from infiltration/inflow (I/I) sources reduces the capacity of the collection system to transport wastewater and may result in sanitary sewer overflows. Groundwater may enter [infiltrate] the collection system through defects, such as open pipe joints, cracks, broken pipe, dropped joints. Inflow, or rainfall [derived] infiltration/inflow (RDII), normally occurs when rainfall enters the sewer system through drains, missing cleanout caps, roof leaders, manhole covers and frame seals, storm sewer cross connections.”

To quantify and determine where groundwater infiltration and RDII could enter the collection system, the study team installed flow monitoring equipment in 18 manholes, chosen at key locations in the FSH system as representative of the system hydraulics. Flow monitoring measures the hydraulic variation of sanitary sewer flows for extended periods under dry- and wet-weather conditions. To measure and record the actual flow, technicians installed a submerged flowmeter inside each of the 18 manholes. Six continuously recording rainfall gauges were also operational, to obtain rainfall intensity and duration for the same monitoring period.



The flowmeter, which is a small probe, is mounted to a steel band installed inside the outgoing pipe at the manhole base. The probe uses sonar to detect fluid velocity; a pressure detector determines the depth of fluid in the outgoing pipe. The probe is connected to a data recorder, which is secured to the side of the manhole chimney. The data recorder captures and stores the flowmeter readings.

Upon activation, each of the 18 meters measured and recorded flow data at 15-minute intervals. Over a 24-hour period, each recorder accumulated 96 data sets, which included velocity (cubic feet per second) and fluid depth (inches). For this study, the 18 flow monitors were active for 39 consecutive days. About once a week, a technician pulled the cover of each meter manhole and connected the recorder to a laptop to upload the data.

Data “Flow”

Using the velocity, fluid depth, and pipe diameter data for each monitored mainline, additional flow data was derived, including Minimum and Maximum Flow, Average Daily Flow, Peak Flow, Ratio of Fluid Depth to Pipe Diameter (d/D), and Percent Full. The wastewater flow monitoring provided adequate hydraulic data to determine the following key information for the system area represented by each meter manhole:

• Dry-Weather Average Daily Flow. The flow data for a typical dry-weather week (not impacted by rainfall) provided an average flow rate per day.
• Dry-Weather Peak Flow. Peak flows recorded during dry weather were compared to the full pipe capacity, to determine the total system capacity being used during dry weather.
• Wet-Weather Average Daily Flow. Wet-weather flows for each recorded rainfall event were analyzed to determine the percentage of rainfall that enters the collection system. Comparing the rainfall event flows with the dry-weather flows established the rainfall-derived infiltration/inflow (RDII).
• Wet-Weather Peak Flow. Peak flow rates during wet weather are critical to the analysis of the total system capacity. Peaking ratios (Peak Flow Rate to Dry-Weather Average Flow) were compared for dry and wet weather.

Results Revealed, Mystery Solved

In addition to data about hydraulic performance under dry- and wet-weather conditions, flow monitoring provides important information about flow patterns. The study team used all of this information to develop a hydraulic model of the FSH Wastewater Collection System, which integrated the flow data for the single mainlines to establish baseline flow patterns. The model uses those patterns to assess existing and future carrying capacity and to predict the performance of the complete collection system under a variety of simulated operational conditions.

As noted by Dave Bowersock, Fort Worth District Senior Engineer, “With the completion of the FSH wastewater system analysis and the hydraulic model results, FSH DPW will have reliable data as well as access to the measurements and assumptions that the Project Delivery Team used to construct the hydraulic model of the system. Planners, utility design engineers, and maintenance personnel will be able to use modeling results to clearly identify problems and create proper system designs for future development at Fort Sam Houston.”

Further, the flow data was used to quantify the RDII, assess its impact on the Fort Sam Houston wastewater collection system, and prioritize areas with excessive I/I for rehabilitation to meet the BRAC requirements. As a result, the study made recommendations of a $2.7M investment in the FSH Wastewater Collection System alone.


Amazing what can be “uncovered” from the wonderful world inside a sanitary sewer manhole!

Paula Robertson is a technical writer/editor, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Worth District

Photo credits: Pipeline Analysis, LLC

Editor's Corner

Last month I told you about my jump to a new state. I've arrived and in whirlwind time, we've unpacked all our boxes (still waiting to hang stuff on the walls), explored the city of Redmond, visited our new doctors and dentist, and had a procedure or two done. My husband being retired has helped in getting much of this done. Me, work is going along as smoothly as it was when I was in Dallas.

Do I miss my LSC friends and family? You bet I do.
Do I want to be back home with y'all? Of course
Yet, a larger purpose exists, so I'm accepting it and getting on.

With the whirlwind mentioned, I wasn't here about two weeks when I was off again to attend Lavacon in sunny San Diego, California. It was a wonderful experience which you can read more about in my review article.

This "rolling stone" (yes, I'm old and know who The Rolling Stones are, do you? -excluding Paul Holland <smiles and hugs, Paul; sorry Kristy>) is still fielding this newsletter from a distance. Got an article! Join Paula and Joshua, SEND THEM IN.

Time is nearing for my favorite Monday evening TV shows, so off this newsletter goes to the Internet presses.

2010 Lavacon

by Jackie Damrau, Fellow



In September, I attended my first Lavacon conference. I encourage everyone to consider attending at least one Lavacon conference. It will truly open your eyes to the wealth of information and the quality of that information. The 2010 Lavacon conference, LavaCon 2.0: The Conference on Digital Media and Content Strategies (http://lavacon.org/), opened the doors of social media to others and me who were or have been skeptical about entering into this social media outlet.

As I always do, I’m going to share with you the nuggets that I took away from the sessions I attended. Feel free to email me at jackie.damrau@comcast.net if you want to know more.

Thursday, 9/30

1. Opening Keynote: Social Media in Business America (Natalie Malaszenko, Director of Social Media & Commerce, PETCO): Natalie’s passion for leading PETCO to work for the customer by listening and including customer ideas in their business decisions. Companies are too willing to cling to the past and want to continue doing what they have always done. They need to develop a social media disaster recovery plan for what to do when events occur. Through social media, you have a matter of a few hours to respond and not the standard 24 hours to make your marketing response or public statement response. Natalie provided her top ten effective social media observations in business:
   1. ROI (return on investment) is in the eye of the beholder (define your successes)
   2. Know that your demographic is key (give customers exciting ways of finding out about your business)
   3. Embrace negativity, yet be ready to change
   4. When you have fun, they have fun
   5. Meet your new business partner: your customer (empower your community to influence others by collaborating with your customers on a common cause)
   6. If you don’t know how to begin, just listen (know where you customer spends their time)
   7. Tools and platforms aren’t always the answer
   8. Shock and awe can convince the top
   9. Messages are co-created. You can start it, yet you won’t finish it
   10. But social teams expand beyond social teams. Hub-and-spoke structure uses employees who know special areas talk with customers about that area using social media.
2. Intelligent Content: The Magic Behind the Curtain (Ann Rockley, The Rockley Group): Ann’s presentation covered how intelligent content should be structurally rich, semantically categorized, and automatically available.
   1. Structurally rich means that we should apply different style sheets for multichannel publishing, filter inappropriate content automatically, and search on content by context of a particular element type.
   2. Semantically categorized uses metadata and tags to enable content to be pushed to wikis and other social media venues by integrating them through mashups and pipes. Without metadata, it is almost impossible to automate.
   3. Automatically available relies on data being easily discoverable, efficiently reusable, dynamically configurable, and completely adaptable.
3. Stop Documenting, Start Designing (Vivian Aschwanden and Jim Smith, Platform Computing Corp.): This session talked about where and when users need information, how to let them stay in task, how many pieces you already know exist fit together to make a coherent user assistance system in the product, and then to think about what to write about. Vivian and Jim talked managing context by new markets and customers, identifying the changes by reviewing different kinds of design documents with a different focus, writing conventional documents as late as possible, communicate with your users more through the GUI (graphical user interface) than the document, and focus your efforts on filling gaps in the user interaction. Gathering this information still requires you to look at the standard design and feature specification documents.
4. Lunch Keynote: State of Social Media in 2010 (Neal Schaffer, Windmill Networking): Neal presented an insight into the social media types—blogs, microblogs, video/photo/podcast sharing, social networking—by telling us that these are not just for marketing. All departments can work together to own the company’s ‘’Social Web’’ presence. Social media should become your free search engine optimization (SEO) tool with companies using their blogs to attract customers to their websites and not the reverse. Neal said that Twitter (www.twitter.com) is the most used social media site for businesses to talk with customers to let them know that they care. A social media strategy should be objective, focus on the customer, present the company brand, and share information. Companies need to make their social media presence about their industry and not all about them. The most important tip he gave was to decide what not to do and get into the social media world.
5. Why Innovate? Getting to Point B using Digital Media (Vivian Aschwanden and Jim Smith, Platform Computing Corp.): Yes, I went to another session of the Aschwanden-Smith team to see what else they had to say. I learned in this session that process is the core for motivating maturity to meet team and corporate goals. Vivian and Jim (re)defined the terms innovation and social media. Innovation is where you create values with new ideas and concepts, values and benefits, that can be incremental or radical. The benefits of re-innovating are to promote higher customer satisfaction, increase productivity, and improve delivery reliability. Social media (re)defined to be a collaborative, real-time common tool that is frequently web-based within corporations. The benefits of social media are seeking process improvements, reducing team constraints, timing to connect with customers, envisioning and defining a stable set of processes, and reenergizing and innovating team interactions. All innovation can use enabling technologies like wikis, SharePoint, Live Meeting, Google docs, Skype, eSupport knowledge bases, community websites, content management system workflows, Facebook, and Twitter.
6. Getting The Word Out: How to Implement Your Online Branding Strategy (Matt Sullivan, roundpeg, inc.): Matt talked about why we use Twitter and how anyone using it should consider using an aggregator, like hootsuite.com, tweetdeck.com, or socialoomph.com, to be able to send out one tweet through as many media channels as possible. He then talk about LinkedIn and the perception that it’s use is for purely professional reasons, that you should be selective about your personal network, display your tweets and blog content on your LinkedIn page, and that, if you are a company, you should create a good landing page and update your information via an aggregator. Matt covered blogs by saying that they should serve as a collection point for varied content, and then he talked about blog tools—Tweetmeme, SexyBookMarks, TwitterTools, Yet Another Related Posts, and Google Sitemap—you can use to improve your social media presence. This session ended with three universal tips:
   1. Be relevant and engaging
   2. Use social media to establish credit (share tips, announce successes, discuss/solve problems)
   3. Be generous (share others’ successes, recirculate/”like”, comment on other blogs, and link share when appropriate).
7. Day 1: Closing Keynote: You’re Only as Good as Your Last Tweet (Crosby Noricks, Red Door Interactive): The day is ending and the head is swimming with all this newly learned information about social media. Crosby had us laughing and learning new phrases of speech (check out the #lavacon tweet stream about “taking your pants off”). We did learn that tweets that include links are far more likely to be retweeted than those without links. The social media Twitter strategy that Crosby recommends is to Identify your goals; Listen to what people are saying; Assign metrics; and Create engaging content. And, she ended with giving us her secret social media sauce:
   1. Make a commitment to participate daily
   2. Share great content by sharing it first
   3. Care about your followers by providing support and solutions

Friday, 10/1

1. Opening Keynote: Get Ready for Socially Enabled Everything (Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler): From Scott’s session, I learned that about goog411, wordle, and how everything should be shareable and syndicatable. Our social efforts should help people do stuff and to remember that it’s not about you, it’s about the relationship and that location awareness is a must. Scott then told us about the next new wave in social media which is augmented reality and that we should take advantage of it. To quote Scott, “Everything is about to change and you need to know if and when you are ready.”
2. Creating a Content Strategy (Rahel Bailie, Intentional Design Inc.): A content strategy should be iterative, not linear as you do your research, write and edit, solicit approvals, translate, and publish your documentation. Rahel talked about the content lifecycle having a strategic component, Analysis, and three tactical components: Collect, Manage, and Publish. This content lifecycle concept is not new to me, yet what I did learn is that we need to pay more attention to the implementation. Implementation involves post-publishing (do you sunset, evaluate, iterate, or archive content?), publishing (how many channels and variations do you need?), management (components versus business rules), and technical (components versus standards). Rahel ended with this, “You need to know where you are going to reach the tactical objectives through effective strategic planning.”
3. Discovering the Hidden Treasure of Dynamic Product Information (Liz Fraley, Single-Sourcing Solutions, Inc.): Content should be customized to the customer so that they can find the information they want quickly to keep them happy and on your site. Knowing how they use their investigative skills through social media is important. We spent time on talking about how to get your information before the C-management level by learning to speak their language and developing a row-based matrix that shows how the product information improves revenues, expands market share, and increases customer loyalty.
4. Lunch Keynote: Why Content Strategists are the Next Corporate Rock Stars (Mark Fidelman, MindTouch): This session took us all back through many of the “Golden Oldies” like the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and such. Yet this walk down memory lane (for those who remember) left that lane and talked about how social media is the new avenue of the city where:
   1. Our content has to be engaging to create revenue (think about iTunes for Apple)
   2. Fans of your content are your community so keep them engaged by getting them to contribute content
   3. We can reduce the noise and provide clarity by connecting content with actual customer requirements
   4. Discovering great content through the use of analytics
   5. Setting the base for your customers that makes them want to visit and use your site to their advantage
5. The Psychology of Social Media (Mario Lehenbauer, University of Vienna): This session was one of the best ones I attended. Being interested in psychology from all perspectives: linguistically, socially, and through business, it was interesting to hear the research that Mario has been doing at the University of Vienna. He talked about the reasons that the Internet is so successful being that it is available 24/7, easy to use, makes people feel mighty and powerful when they log in and seed content as an active user, that it creates a feeling of intimacy as we begin connecting with others online, and how we lose track of time when we are surfing the Internet. Mario then talked about seeding behavior in its uses and gratification approaches, high versus low seeders, and that there is no gender differences, and concluded by talking about the focus that he is seeing on Twitter and Facebook.
6. Integrating Content Management and Business Process Management (Katie Hicks, Hewlett-Packard): This session covered how Katie’s group at HP is effective reusing its content by identifying gaps in technical use, partner involvement, and built-in terminology and style, and deliverable flexibility.
7. Getting the Most Out of Twitter…Everywhere! (Char James-Tanny, JTF Associates Inc.): Char is a GREAT speaker. If you ever get a chance to hear her, please do. She shared so much information with us that our heads were reeling by the end of the session. Of course, this session was for those more advanced in using social media; however, for me, a social media newbie, it gave me more reason to “try” to begin using it more. Char shared a selected number of social media applications that we should consider using, such as:
   1. Twitter clients: twitter.pbworks.com/Apps; squidoo.com/twitterapps (or just do a Google search for “twitter apps” to see how many are out there)
   2. Twitter services: tuttoaster.com; work.blogspot.com
      1. Reading and filtering: tweetscan.com; tweetbeat; Cadmus, My6Sense
      2. Notifications: Twitstra
      3. Analysis and quality: refollow.com, foller.me, klout
      4. Location: friendorfollow.com
      5. Widgets: Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn (keep business away from personal)
      6. Corporate environment: yammer.com
      7. Security: check your security and use “Revoke Access” as needed

Saturday, 10/2

1. Social Networking, Social Presence and Social Boundaries (Phylise Banner, American Public University): Attending a session where the presenter is an expressive poet and educator is interesting. If you know Phylise, you know that her expressiveness is unique. Let’s just say that the way she started this morning’s session off was “all the rage” the rest of the day and on the #lavacon twitter stream. Yes, we did learn stuff, so here it is.
   1. We are public by default and private by effort. When using social media, we make a conscious effort to decide what we will share and what we won’t. Our relationships are based on common interests, which is why we connect with certain people. We determine intimacy levels by trust and define circles of exposure, trust, and curate our private lives.
   2. The identity we create is distinct in each world we exist it: social, personal, and corporate. There’s even a word for this: multiphrenic self. Look it up and tell me what you learned.
   3. Reputation is where we decide what image we want to shape and present to everyone and depending on that image, you have to know whether you can start fresh after messing up. Introvert, extrovert, another –vert, can we change?
   4. We create our social role/capital through social contracts where the only way we are known or visible is if we openly share personal or relational content with others. Some are comfortable, others are not. Doing this online is even more frightening for some and less for others.
   5. Finally, we establish boundaries that are firm and impregnable as the price is high and carries great risk. When boundaries become permeable, movement becomes more fluid (Flanigan, 2010).
2. What’s Your Content Doing and Where is it Going? (Lee Traupel, LinkedMedia): Content is anything (text, images, …) that is everywhere. It’s also audio/video, social conversations, blogs-wikis-discussion groups, corporate websites, and mobile devices. Great content requires creating, publishing, and measuring compelling words and images that resonate with your audience. Determining how and where social media fits in requires looking at how using existing content, knowing the analytics, and whether ROI being received is ample. Connecting with your audience requires being engaging and having a personality, must be keyword-rich (SEO friendly), is relevant and fresh, and gets picked up by social streams (retweeted). The social web is vast, broad, and deep; it is global with no boundaries or borders, and is driven by many-to-many conversations with others and replicated. Cross-pollinating your content through the social media channels to garner business and reputation is necessary, yet be aware that it can consume a large portion of your time. For businesses, the absolutes for social content marketing are that your content must have value and be well written, integrate your community with appropriate ads, should leverage social influencers, and be measurable and quantifiable. Metrics comes with everything these days, even content. Content metrics focuses on measuring the social voice and brand mentions, capturing audience engagement, understanding how conversations reach across multiple social networks, and bringing an insight into having key influencers onboard with your brand. Lee recommended that you write a blog post once and have it retweeted, picked up on LinkedIn, and spanned through other social networks.

Do you think we learned about social media? We did. The end of each day we were exhausted with all the relevant, timely, and interesting information we received. As I said, this being my first Lavacon conference was an eye-opener. Will I attend others? Definitely yes! Should you attend a Lavacon conference? Why wouldn’t you!

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Kudos to Jack Molisani, the organization of Lavacon, and to John Hedtke, who insisted I attend. Without these two wonderful folks, I probably wouldn’t have gone. I’m glad I did. By the way, the photos you see throughout this article are ones that were taken from my cell phone during a walking night tour that Jack put together of the Gaslamp District in San Diego. He made sure that once we were exhausted with information, we became exhausted with all the historical elements of San Diego.

Sketching User Interfaces - Meeting Review

by Emily Young

The Lone Star Community (LSC) of the Society of Technical Communicators met Thursday, September 16, 2010, at the REI sporting goods store off LBJ Freeway in Dallas.

The meeting kicked off with old friends greeting each other, some of them meeting again for the first time in many years. Jason's Deli catered the informal dinner and LSC members chatted and mingled before the program began. The most interesting part of the dinner was the disappearing/reappearing chicken salad sandwiches. I looked for a chicken salad sandwich before I sat down, but could not find any, and concluded that they had all been liberated from the table. However, when the person accompanying me to the meeting sat down next to me, I was shocked to see that—even though she was behind me in line—she had a chicken salad sandwich on her plate! I promptly returned to the sandwich trays, but still could not find a chicken salad sandwich. It was so disappointing. I mean, the chicken salad had pineapple in it for gosh sake.

President Arroxane Eber called the meeting to order and began with reminders for LSC members that our greatest tool as a community is our website: www.stc-dfw.org.

The website has a job board, a "help desk" forum for questions, and links to past newsletters and upcoming competitions. LSC is also on Facebook. This is a great opportunity to help build a great online resource for ourselves and to create a guidebook for future technical communication professionals. Join us online today!

The highlight of the meeting was Brian Sullivan’s presentation on “Sketching User Interfaces with the Design Studio Method.” The process is based on the theory that sketching ideas leads to innovation. This remarkable technique uses a trained facilitator to take a group of developers through an intense design session and forces the group to collaborate on a single, well-thought-out product. It is a method for involving all development team members so that the strong personalities are balanced out by the more timid personalities. It is also a way to bring the good ideas to the surface and leave behind the rest, saving a great deal of time. The team is lead through several sessions of pencil-and-paper sketching with group discussion sessions in between. The goal at the end of the session is that a fully fleshed-out idea to present for creation.

Contact Brian Sullivan at brian.sullivan@sabre.com if this sounds like something your company could use or if you would like more information. Brian suggests reading Edward de Bono's book, “Six Thinking Hats” if you want to learn more about facilitating groups of people.

The LSC will meet online for the first time on October 21, 2010, with a webinar on “Designing Surveys for User Experience” presented by our own Elisa Miller.