Crowd-Enabled Technical Writing Services

Availability of high quality technical documentation is a critical enabler for users to fully take advantage of service capabilities, such as Cloud-based offerings where clients interact with the service via a portal and have no direct access to a service support. Technical writers are relying on the input from subject matter experts (SMEs) to create usable portal content. This disrupts service operation and reduces the productivity of the entire service offering team. While technical documentation may include contributions from a large distributed team, it often results in disconnected content with different writing styles. In this paper, we describe Scribe Crowd, a service for managing the process of composition of technical documents. Based on the principles of crowdsourcing, where a task may be outsources to many qualified agents, Scribe Crowd manages the distributed process of documentation and assigns incomplete pieces of write-up to appropriate experts. We present how Scribe Crowd has been used to engage over 120 business consultants to efficiently create content for 450 documents as part of an enterprise learning portal that serves information about banking, insurance and financial markets.