Communications from DMN

Milan Davidovic left a thought-provoking comment on a recent post in this space. It had to do with giving users incentives to learn lightweight markup languages when they contribute community-generated documentation.

We’ve been thinking about that comment, and have been wondering what incentives companies (and free/Open Source software projects) can give users to contribute documentation. We discussed this with Anne Gentle in a podcast a while back, and Anne devoted some of her book to that topic.

But we’re sure there’s more to it than even that. Dru Lavigne touched on some reasons people would want to get involved in a presentation at FSOSS 2009.

So, here’s a question we’d like to throw out to the wider tech comm world. What incentives would you give to users to contribute to the so-called official documentation set? And if you actually have users who do just that, what incentives (if any) do you give them?

Feel free to share your thoughts, ideas, and reality by leaving a comment.