Articles
Report from the STC Technical Communication Summit 2010
This year’s Technical Communication Summit began with the announcement that the society has returned to financial health after a year of intense crisis. This upbeat news set the tone and the mood for the conference, where many ideas of content strategy, put forward during STC France’s CS Forum 10 were reiterated and elaborated, together with excellent sessions on usability and other related subjects. Read on for more information about society leadership, the main themes of the conference, and our award.
This year’s STC Technical Communications Summit 2010 was held in Dallas, Texas, USA. Try as I might, I was unable to catch any glimpse of JR Ewing or his family, however (here, you are intended to smile…).
Overall, the mood of the conference was much more positive and upbeat than last year, as the society has weathered its own financial crisis and is now back in reasonable frinancial shape.
As far as I could tell, Europe was under-represented this year. Besides myself, I was aware of two people from Sweden (STC TransAlpine Chapter) who kept a low profile, and Monika Duvinage from the France chapter. The STC UK and Ireland Chapter was represented by new president David Hollis and past president Ant Davey.
Leadership Day
For those that have never attended a summit, Leadership Day is a pre-conference day-long session attended by chapter administrative council members and society leaders. I attended as a board member from STC France chapter.
STC international president Cindy Currie announced that we are in good financial health, and was greeted with sighs of relief. 25% of the debt recovery effort, according to their pie chart, came from chapters like ours. The lion’s share came from society reserves (cashing in investments, etc.). Some also came from a line of credit, which they did not fully use.
Attendance at the summit is up, and the hotel commitment was met for the first time in many years. This year’s summit is self-sustaining. In the past, the Society counted on profits from the summit to finance other activities that memberships did not fully cover. This year, prudence dictated that they not plan on this, so most folks present at Leadership Day were content with the result.
The new dues structure caused quite a lot of discussion; most geographical chapters reported that they have suffered membership losses as a result, STC France included. The board folks claim that overall across the board, membership is up, but no one could find any chapter whose membership increased. There was a lively discussion of what it means to be a geographical community in the age of telepresence and social media, and many spoke about redefining ourselves to be sure that we continue to provide value to our members.
Another important announcement made was that the board had approved a professional certification programme. They chose a programme based on presentation of a work portfolio, rather than one based on an examination. Most attendees seemed to be quite happy that this has come about, but there has since been heated discussion over the methodology in the STC blogs. You can find more information on this and follow the discussions from the stc.org home page. I encourage all readers to add their opinions, especially from a European point of view, to the conversation.
The most interesting result from leadership day was a draft report presented by a Community Funding & Support task force that was formed last year. This group presented a number of recommendations that were, in my view, right on the mark and well thought out, designed to strengthen our geographic communities and SIGs.
It was also announced that the STC will have its own social networking platform based on the GoLightly system. I saw a demo that was prepared for STC by GoLightly, that used as its example the NTEN site.
What I saw was without surprises. It seems a platform very similar to what Ning has provided to STC France. STC plans to have areas available for local communities, SIGs, and individual members as well. A number of folks raised the “walled garden” question; i.e., will we only be communicating amongst ourselves? In my view, it could be that, but I think the real benefit to the society and to the chapters will be if it is open and available to all, and is well publicized.
Conference Sessions
It is clear that the focus of interest in our profession is changing. Sessions on how to do DITA and topic-based-authoring, while still popular, gave ground to content strategy and usability oriented sessions. Rachel Lovinger, Colleen Jones and Rahel Bailie contributed multiple times during the conference, including some repeats of CS Forum 10 presentations.
In general I thought the quality of the presentations was pretty high, though there was still a bias toward less experienced members, not as many advanced level presentations as I might have liked.
I participated with Dan Voss in his progression on mentoring, where he explained the story of his mentoring experience with STC France secretary Clio Fouque, and introduced me as “much less attractive” than she is. We shared stories of the Orlando chapter’s mentoring program, and how STC France has begun a new program based on Orlando’s experience.
As I mentioned, the interest of participants seems to be moving toward a more multi-disciplinary definition of our profession that includes content strategy, information architecture, usability, translation and localization as well as traditional technical authoring. One of the best sequences, in my opinion, was the “Usability Institute” – a track presented by solid professionals and targeted at advanced level. These sessions were stimulating, varied and well-attended.
The Question of Value
STC is obligated, due to a commitment made many years ago in a different economic climate, to holding the summit in specific hotels in each of the designated host cities for a few more years.
In Dallas it was clear to most people that this was unfortunate. The hotel was located away from the true centre of Dallas, and it was difficult to get away from the hotel area and explore our host city even when there was free time available. Prices were exceedingly high, with little perceived value, most notably the SIG breakfasts, after which many participants actually went to the restaurant to have a “real breakfast.”
It’s clear that STC has little or no influence over the hotel’s pricing policies, especially when they know that we are committed in advance and don’t have a lot of choice.
The wisdom of this strategy has already been debated to death, and the Society has learned its lesson, I believe. I truly expect that when the current commitment ends, Summit venues will be negotiated in a more logical manner.
It should be noted, however, that the question of perceived value is very important to members, and that a more affordable venue will go a long way to improve attendance and the perception of value, especially for members outside the U.S. who have to deal with expensive travel and currency fluctuations just to arrive on site.
Hospitality and an Award for STC France
Monika Duvinage joined me on stage at the annual Awards Banquet to receive the Pacesetter Award, which we won jointly with the TransAlpine chapter and Europe SIG, for innovative collaboration and leadership in staging our Content Strategy event, CS Forum 10, in Paris.
The Toronto chapter, which also won a Pacesetter Award, joined with us to host a celebratory reception that was quite well attended.
I left the summit with the clear sense that our society is just at the beginning of a reinvention process that is going to take some time. I also left it feeling that even if there was room for improvement in the Summit, I had learned a lot, and acquired many stimulating ideas for developing our community and enriching our profession.
Andrea Wenger · 21 June 2010, 05:28
This is a well-stated, succinct, yet comprehensive summary, Ray. One point of clarification: overall membership is down, but higher than projected, and continuing to increase throughout the year.