What does Ngombor have to do with documentation?
So often the SMEs we work with want to throw people into the middle of the conversation.
I was talking about Ngombor Community Development Alliance in the Write the Docs Slack recently and someone asked me what Ngombor had to do with documentation.
It was an excellent question as I'd thrown some Ngombor information at a channel without contextualizing. I'd been a terrible technical writer, marketer and organizational storyteller. What did fundraising for a community organization in Uganda have to do with technical writing? For some, it was a logical continuation of a conversation. For others it was baffling to be suddenly thrust into the middle of a conversation where they did not have the context to understand what I was talking about. In the heat of the moment, how would someone tell the difference between me and any random person trying to sell a product?
So often the SMEs we work with want to throw people into the middle of the conversation. They've been working on something for months, maybe years and they just want to display the logical conclusion. It's frustrating. I don't know how many times I've needed to help engineers understand that a little bit of context, a little bit of grounding information at the top of the doc is not patronizing, it's not unnecessarily slowing people down. Context and introductory information helps people (or machines), who are not in the middle of whatever the conversation is, access the meaning of a document. It helps people who might not have the precise words for describing their situation, find their way.
And I must laugh and pause here, and I hope you are laughing too. Most of the world doesn't really play baseball, it's not global terminology! When it comes to jargon, inside baseball is a little inside baseball!