Reaching the STC Summit (Part Two)

By Ursula McCloy

Main Entrance to the Convention Centre

Monday -- Day 1

Sessions started on Monday, and I have to say I was disappointed. I musta picked the wrong topics or something, but they were all so general I couldn't find anything useful to take away. Everyone was going on about DITA, single sourcing, social media, Web 2.0, and Agile development. Well. If you don't happen to be able to completely re-invent your work environment, most of that is useless. I write SDK documentation for a niche market. There ain't no hashtag for it, and I don't think there ever should be. There is no point in single sourcing something that only gets used in one place anyways. And there's no way you can write a cute little task topic for the hairy situations our customers use our software for.

Entrance to the Vendor Showcase

But I loved the vendor showcase. I'm in the market for a new help authoring tool, and have been pondering the best option for over a year. This was my opportunity to corner their reps and ask all the questions that are relevant to me. And they listen! Little ol' me who only needs to buy three licenses -- they listen to what I'm saying as if I was outfitting a team of hundreds! I've got two private discussions lined up for when I get back, to see how two different pieces of software can be used in a new workflow.

End of day wrapped up with a get-together at a pub, with a strong Canadian presence and a younger (ahem) demographic. The pub had 14 kinds of their home-brew on tap, which made it an excellent opportunity to network. Nuff said :). I've never been to Sacramento either, so I really enjoyed the downtown core where the conference was located - a blend of old & new architecture, civic art, beautiful gardens, restaurants, pedestrian ways, and so on. I wonder if all the STC summits are so happily situated?



Tribute to the Pony Express in Old Sacramento



State Building



The Peace Garden, full of roses and writings from children about peace

Tuesday Day 2

About face. The sessions today were AWESOME. Lots of new concepts I could directly apply to current work: better ways to map requirements to user design; faceted navigation to assemble documentation pieces into content that is applicable for the situation; ways to start planning content strategy; better ways to estimate projects work.

Beyond that, there were thought stretching times. At a meeting for one of my SIGs (Information Design & Architecture), we had a heated discussion about the difference between the architecture of information, content strategy, and visual design, and how they relate to one another. Another session where Michael Priestly (godfather of DITA; he actually presented DITA at our chapter meeting about 4 years ago, waaaay before any publishing tool supported it) demonstrated their new, open source, online content delivery system.

There were also ideas that I could take back to others at my company: for the S&M team (that's Sales & Marketing in case you're getting any ideas about my workplace), ways to manage content and analyze our website; for my team's Product Manager, ways to identify and prioritize real user goals (not just the ones we dream up).

Wednesday Day 3

Where'd the time go? The last day went by in a blur of sessions. Learned to duck out of ones that just didn't live up to their descriptions or were too general for my liking. Some speakers are insightful enough you just go see them, even though the topic seems like it has nothing to do with your work. Sometimes there would be three sessions I was interested in running simultaneously, so I'd have to make a tough choice. But with summit registration, you now get access to all recorded sessions (speaker audio and screen capture), so there's a way to catch the ones you missed. I'm also super excited about sharing the best sessions with my team mates back home. Maybe we'll listen to one a week over lunch, and talk about the ideas it presents and the changes we can make as a team.

Spent more time talking to people, between sessions, finding how they handled the topics we had just listened to (or were about to listen to) at their companies where they were stuck, where they had made a change, what kind of transition they were in, how their work environment differed from mine. Yeah, I know you're supposed to network for personal career development, but really it felt more like finding someone with a common interest or hobby, and getting right into it with them. It's like a club with a secret handshake. Where's the best fishing hole? The best place to buy lures? The biggest fish you caught? What technique did you use? The tacit understanding of what it takes to go out for hours and sit in a boat, to produce a single edible specimen.

Convention Centre Ceiling

Then, in a flash the Summit is all done. The last session is over, suitcases are packed and wheeled away, my mind is full of ideas and innovation. On the long flight home to reality, I pondered what things I can try to implement right away, and what will just percolate in the back in my mind until an opportunity arises. At work, I've bored all the non-writers with details of the DITA methodology, and peaked some interest in distributing our documentation more dynamically through our website. Maybe I can get something to change after all!

STC Summit - Topic Trends

By Debbie Kerr

Prior to coming to the conference, I tried to plan which education sessions I wanted to attend. Since I was going to a conference for technical communicator, nearly every session seemed to apply to me. I took my best guess at what I thought would be the best for me. However, once I got to Dallas and started looking again, I started to develop stronger feelings about some sessions over others. The name of the speaker made the difference. In other cases, I noticed something in the session descriptions that I hadn't notice it before. It was like being told you could only have one piece of candy when all of them looked good. With this in mind, I spent every night reviewing the next day's sessions to make sure that what I thought were my best selections before I arrived at the Summit were still my best choices.

When I was planning for the conference, Fei Min Lorente (your fearless president) and Carol Lawless (your chapter secretary) suggested that I select two sessions for each time slot so that if one session wasn't providing me with the information that I wanted I could go to my second choice. I am happy to report, in all cases, that I was satisfied with my first choice.

On May 3, I attended the following sessions:

• Assessing Your Corporate Value - Jack Molisani


• Using Stories for More Effective Usability - Whitney Quesenbery


• Content Management as a Practice - Pamela Kostur (my favourite for the day)

On May 4, I attended the following sessions:

• How to Edit Online Like a Pro! - Linda Oestreich and Michelle Corbin


• Creating Visual Help and Training Using Adobe Acrobat - Neil Perlin


• Managing Documentation Projects in a Collaborative World - Larry Kunz (one of my favourites for the day)


• Content Strategy SIG Progression - too many presenters to mention


• Building Visual Explanations: Practical Advice for Writers - Don Moyer (my favourite of the Summit)

On May 5, I attended the following sessions:

• Results of Interviewing Editors: Best Practices, Challenges, Insights - Angela Eaton, Liz Pohland, Cynthia McPherson


• Thriving in an Agile Environment - Kathryn Poe


• Enhance Your Writing Career with Improved Speaking Skills - Barrie Byron

While the topics may seemed varied, there were two hot topics for the Summit: Content Strategy and Agile. Some of these topics you can see in the title of the sessions and others were embedded in the topic descriptions.

Social Media

With changes in the way that information can be presented to users, a content strategy is becoming more accurate than preparing a documentation plan. With the various social media options available (e.g. forums, wikis, Twitter, and blogs), many organizations are looking toward using these resources in addition to traditional documentation. In some cases, these other methods of communication will replace all or some of the more traditional methods. For this reason, the method for planning how to provide users with information must be an entire content strategy, and not merely focused on documentation.

For example, in one education session, the presenter talked about how someone had used Twitter to learn when users were having trouble with a product. Since the success of a company is often based on customer service, being proactive in providing information is an excellent place to start. Imagine being on Twitter and complaining to someone that a particular feature doesn't work. Wouldn't be great if someone from that company contacted you and provided you with an answer without you even having to contact them? In many cases, users don't even ask for assistance from the company. They often complain about the company/product without trying to get an answer to their questions. Using Twitter helps to eliminate this step.

Another interesting way to use Twitter is to get sales leads and to obtain feedback about what features users would like to see in a product. Another way that companies are using social media is to use wikis for Help and forums for customers to obtain support from either the company or fellow users. Social media seems to have more uses than just being sociable.

Agile

Agile is a new way of planning and completing a project. This methodology replaces the traditional waterfall and iterative waterfall that is usually used for the software development life cycle. With Agile, requirements, development, documentation, and testing, take place over and over in iterations that build on the previous iteration. One iteration might include A, B, and C. The second iteration will include any necessary changes to A, B, and C, and new items D and E. This process will continue until everything is complete -- development, documentation, and testing.

The major change for technical communicators is that everyone involved in the design and development cycles are part of the project right from the beginning. This means moving from the end of the development cycle to being involved right from the beginning. As you can imagine, for many technical communicators, this is a big and welcome change.

Some people enter into the Agile world for the wrong reasons, for example, they believe that it will eliminate the need for documentation and that everything will get done faster. The truth is that documentation will still be needed; it just might be created using different timelines, which will necessitate writing and reviewing documentation in a different way. As for getting work done faster, this will only be true if the people involved in the process have the discipline needed to complete their work on time and in the way that is needed. Without this discipline, companies can end up with more chaos than they may have had before.

Conclusion

It seems like there is a lot of potential changes to the role of technical communicator. It also emphasizes that the term technical writer does not accurately reflect our changing role.

STC Summit - Tourist Tidbits

By Debbie Kerr

The Summit was held in the Hyatt Regency hotel, which is the building on the right. The structure on the left is Reunion Tower, which has several components that include Wolfgang Puck's restaurant (Five Sixty) and an observation deck. Unfortunately, the tower was closed for renovations. Based on information that I found on the Internet, it seems that the tower has been closed for over a year.

Although the tower was closed to the public, the lights on the top of the were still visible at night. My husband managed to take this picture when we were returning during one of many trips to the nearby Historical District.

The Historic District contains items associated with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. There is the Book Depository, the grassy knoll (where some believe there was a second gunman), the JFK Memorial, and even an X on the road where President Kennedy was shot. The Book Depository is where the Sixth Floor Museum is located. This is the location from which Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy. Ironically, while we were there, someone tried to rob the museum of both money and some artefacts; however, the thieves never got away.

One day, while I was attending some of the education sessions, my husband rented a car and looked at some sites farther away from the downtown area. His day trip included the Texas Motor Speedway, the Cowboys Stadium and the Rangers Ballpark. At the speedway, his tour guide (shuttle bus driver) got permission to go around the track with my husband, so they sped around the track going 80 mph. At the stadium, my husband did his own walking tour and got lots of valuable information by talking to the employees onsite. While he did not go into Rangers Ballpark, he did get some great pictures.

On 4.2 acres of downtown Dallas, there is Pioneer Plaza, which contains approximately 40 statues of longhorn steer, complete with cowboys. These larger than life statues show a typical cattle drive. My husband found out about this site when he talked to Manny, who worked at the hotel. Manny turned out to be a wealth of information.

One of the sites that I did see, and the one that is my favourite, is a 120 year old building in downtown Dallas called the Old Red Museum. On top of this building are four decorative creatures called Acroteria/Wyverns (from the Latin word "serpents). Each of these creatures also have two feet and wings. There is also a clock tower and stained glass windows.

As you can see, there is lots to see in Dallas.

The Summit 2010, Keynote Speaker and Education Sessions Begin

By Debbie Kerr

For most of the conference attendees, this was the day when the bulk of us started learning. The Leadership Day enabled me to learn from one perspective, the remaining days were opportunities for me to learn from another perspective.

The first stage of learning was from the keynote speaker. Erin McKean—Chief Consulting Editor, American Dictionaries for Oxford University Press, as well as founder and CEO of Wordnik —showed us how words, especially when considered as part of the history of the dictionary, are as much fun as we expected. She talked about the first issue of the dictionary and how there were instructions on how to look up things in alphabetical order. There was even a description of what alphabetical meant! To top this off, it was written in an older form of English (looketh up writing from the 1600s and you will knoweth what I mean). :-)

She poked fun at the dictionary itself because it describes a dictionary has having one-sentence descriptions of words that are captured in a book. If you have ever looked at a dictionary, you know that there is far more content than one sentence and it no longer needs to be in a book.

She also talked about dictionaries defining what without capturing, who, how, where and when. Her example was the word "tuxedo". Without context, how would you know if the person wearing the tuxedo was a waiter or James Bond? To give you an example of Erin's sense of humour, this was conveyed with pictures of Lego figures, where only one was carrying a gun and an attache case.

She also gave an example of a definition of a feather that went on for about five lines, which left us more confused than ever before. Talk about poor choices of words and the passive voice!

All in all, the topic struck a chord with the audience, and it became quite clear why she had just been made an Honorary Fellow of the Society.

After the keynote speaker, the more intense learning began. Because of the keynote speaker, the education sessions did not start until 1:30 pm, but they continued throughout the day until 6:15 pm. During that time I attended the following sessions (each of which is about 1.5 hours long):

• Assessing/Increasing Your Corporate Value


• Using Stories for More Effective Usability


• Content Management as a Practice

The last session hit home with me because it related to some projects that I have been working on lately. It emphasized the importance of putting processes in place even before selecting a tool, and even deciding if a tool is needed. Ironically, the speaker is from Toronto. It was particularly funny (for me) when she mentioned Canada's win over the U.S. team in the Olympics. Things went uphill after that. :-)

After these learning sessions, I attended a Community Reception. It's at events like this that you get a good sense of just how international the organization is. As a member in your own town or city, you don't really think about India, France, Israel, Australia or even the vastness of the United States, and just how many states there really are. After a short time at a networking event—not to mention Leadership Day, and talking to the person beside you at one of the education sessions—you have a real eye-opening experience. You start to recognize the vastness of the technical communication profession, of which you are an important part.

I am writing this blog entry between learning sessions, which is when I am supposed to be eating; however, to get free Internet access, which is set up in the Exhibitition Hall, I have to use the terminals a little off hours, although, as you can see from the picture, there really is no down time.

My head is getting ready to burst with all the new information. It helps to write about it and share it with others. Stayed tuned for more details about some great sessions that I have attended so far today.

The Summit 2010, Leadership Day

By Debbie Kerr

Leadership Day started at 7:30 am Sunday morning. Perhaps it was a test of leadership to be on time for this event and still follow the great presentations going on. Not all people are morning people.

The day started with Cindy Currie, STC President, providing a summary of the financial crisis and how the Society survived and even made a small profit after taking many actions to deal with a projected deficit.

In an effort to let chapters participate in how we move forward, the Society asked for volunteers to be on a task force -- Community Funding and Support. One of the members of that task force is from the West Coast Chapter in British Columbia. Four members of the task force gave a presentation, which was really well received. In fact, their observations and recommendations were one of the highlights of the morning as the leaders (both Chapters and Society) recognized the validity and value of the information.

In the afternoon, there were various progressions to attend. I participated in the following:

• Re-engineering Your Community
• How to Create Webinars
• Community Funding and Support
• Developing Educational Programs

Everyone had some great ideas. The day was full of a lot of questions and answers -- so many that one of the items on the agenda had to be dropped. Some of the suggestions require more research at the Society level. I look forward to seeing the end result.

Look for my next post about the keynote speaker and my first education seminars.

The Summit 2010, Travelling to Dallas

By Debbie Kerr

I am the Immediate Past President of the chapter. In a draw that the chapter held to see which council member would attend this conference, my name was selected. The last conference did not go well for me -- my appendix ruptured and I spent my time in Las Vegas, the place of the conference, in a hospital room. The standard bon voyage message as I left for the conference had something to do with returning and having all my organs intact.

In an effort to keep costs down, I decided to fly out of Detroit. Although the drive was a long one, the weather was good and I saved about $400 in the process.

While the drive was long, the sleep was limited. I got up at 3:30 am to make sure I caught my 6:45 am plane. The lineups at the airport were like those at Wonderland. I couldn't believe that there would be so many people at the airport at that awful hour. The plane out of Detroit was delayed because of a storm (lightning, high winds, and heavy rains). I was glad that it started before takeoff rather than after. Although there was some turbulence, I arrived in one piece.

My husband came with me on the trip, so in an effort to do something together before all the meetings and education sessions started, we tried out Dallas's transportation system and went to the Dallas Zoo. The zoo in Toronto is a lot bigger, but from the walking we did and the pain in our feet, my husband and I were glad that the zoo wasn't any bigger.

Bedtime was early because, between the 3:30 am start and the amount of walking, we were exhausted. Our last bit of exercise was trying to climb up into bed. The top of the mattresses was about 3 feet off the floor, which meant that neither my husband or I could touch the floor when we were sitting on the mattress.

The Leadership Day started at 7:30 am the next day, so I wanted to be wide awake for the discussions.

Look for my next blog entry about Leadership Day. I am off to my first education session.