Articles
Time for Change: Reinventing STC France
19 September 2010
Ray Gallon
President
STC France
As the incoming STC France Chapter President for the 2010-11 term, I would like to introduce myself, share details of our recently elected leadership team, and provide some insight to what is coming in the months ahead.
Saying that the results of this year’s chapter leadership election were “unanimous” has become something of an inside joke. Our chapter elections tend not to see much candidate competition, so unanimous results are the norm in recent years. Hint: If you’d like to see a more exciting election next time, why not run for a position on the board?!
Election results
Without further ado, let’s announce the new officials. They are:
- Ray Gallon, Chapter President
- Clio Fouque, Vice President
- Clio Fouque, Secretary
- Robert Adlington, Treasurer
There are only two changes. I replace Stuart Culshaw as President, and Clio Fouque takes over as Vice President while retaining her post as Secretary too. Robert continues to serve as Treasurer. He’s pretty good at it.
Ongoing Volunteers
Prior to elections, our core team of volunteers included Destry Wion as Web Manager, Keith Jackson as Membership Manager, and myself as Educational Outreach Manager. Destry and Keith remain on in their roles, and are doing great work.
I’m relinquishing my former role to focus on more encompassing presidential duties, though will continue to help drive this important activity wherever possible – hopefully with the help of a new volunteer interested in helping us improve our educational outreach and university relations.
Stuart Culshaw, France Chapter president for the past two years, in addition to cotinuing to provide guidance and support to myself and the rest of the team, will be taking on the the role of Chapter Community Manager. His history with the chapter is long and his knowledge great. His sole responsibility (which I’m sure is a relief after serving as President for two consecutive terms), is to make better use of our social channels and maintaining a dialogue in the respective communities.
Accomplishments and Objectives
The STC France Annual General Meeting (AGM) will take place on September 28, 2010 from 7pm at the Café du Pont Neuf, 14, Quai du Louvre, 75001 Paris (Metro Pont Neuf or Louvre-Rivoli, RER Chatelet Les Halles) — Register here). We strongly encourage you to come along and join us in celebrating our recent achievements and looking to the future, especially if you are new to the chapter, or even if you are not (yet) a member but are interested in our projects and activities for the coming year. We’ll also be providing plenty of opportunity for you to share your own ideas and suggestions on how STC France can most effectively help and support you in your professional development.
Continuing Focus on the Fundamentals: Good Content Strategy
As far back as February 2009, when the seeds were planted for Content Strategy Forum 2010 (which took place in Paris last April), we’ve all been focused on implementing a real content strategy for the chapter. Implementing a real content strategy is fundamentally the most important thing we can do to take STC France to the next level, because if we fail to communicate our business, services and activities in the best way we can, then we are failing both you and the chapter. It should be no mystery, and especially considering the chapter’s virtual nature, that our website is the mothership when it comes to communication with you members and the rest of the world. Satellite channels like our newsletter and social networks (Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, etc.) are important pieces of the puzzle too.
Let me give you a couple peeks at what I mean.
A Localised Website
Over the last few months we’ve been working hard to put in place a content translation program to work on developing a French language version of our website. Led by Keith Jackson, this process has been exploring various avenues of collaboration and methodology so that when the time comes we have a means of producing content in both English and French with the least amount of difficulty. There’s still a ways to go, but we’re getting there.
In parallel, our web manager, Destry Wion, will be implementing the technical infrastructure required to turn our current content management system (CMS) into a truly multilingual publishing platform. Running a completely bilingual website—top to bottom—is more than just translating existing content, it’s an overhaul of almost exponential proportions, requiring a great deal of technical preparation, enhanced information architecture and beefed-up editorial guidelines. Needless to say, we’ll be implementing the changes in a gradual process, documenting and developing standards and practices as we go, which we hope will help provide models for others to use in globalisation and localisation efforts. Let us know if you’re interested in getting involved in this exciting initiative!
Renewed Focus on Editorial Schedule
In addition to a localised website objective, and planned improvements to our community channels (may the hackneyed terms “social media” be stricken from our developing style guide!), we aim to improve our editorial process too, producing more quality articles on a regular basis, and on a range of topics relevant to our chapter in modern times.
For one thing, we hope to get each of our team members to publish more regularly, giving each of them the opportunity to write about their professional interests and activities in whatever capacity interests them. Likewise, we want to open the door for more of our members and friends to submit feature articles of their own.
Destry has been making some wonderful enhancements to our CMS (it’s Textpattern CMS, in case you are wondering, which Destry can’t say enough good things about), which will make it easier for us to accommodate more authors of feature articles. If you would like to see your name and photo in lights, consider submitting a feature article to STC France for review and publication. Articles are accepted in either French or English. If you are unsure about a topic, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us, but we’re pretty sure you know what to say. :)
Your Feedback Needed
There are gray areas we need to address, and the steps we take largely reflect what is important to you. Specifically, the futures of our newsletter and community channels.
Our newsletter is a difficult consideration; it’s been with us a long time, delivered via a medium (email) that’s as engrained in our lifestyles as Web surfing, and is a traditional artifact in the STC way of things. More of us on the team even like it than not, I think, though not all. The problem, however, is we have little idea if anyone on the receiving end is reading the newsletters, or finds it useful. We need your feedback to know if investing our efforts into producing a newsletter is worthwhile.
Those of you who have been following will know that the STC France Ning community is now defunct. Our Ning site was initially created under experimental conditions as a replacement for the late Yahoo Groups community we used to maintain (and which now sounds as appealing as a manual typewriter). The Ning community, however, saw very little use in the more than twelve months it was available. Furthermore, Ning recently changed their pricing policy, dropping support for free Ning accounts and requiring communities to pay a substantial fee to maintain the same level of functionality they had been providing up to now. On the surface, the decision seemed easy, expressed by the obvious question: since our Ning community isn’t used much anyway, why pay to maintain it? Now that it’s gone, we’ll be investing more of our time and energy on our other community channels – Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook. We are toying with the idea of replacing Ning with another social community tool, though the jury is still out on that one. Do you have any thoughts or suggestions to bring to the debate?
Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin are already used by a lot of people (members and non-members alike), so they don’t require members to create and manage yet another online account. Further, these tools already provide robust communication features, like threaded discussions with email notifications, individual profiles, subgroup for more ficused discussions, and so forth. Using three of the most popular community tools out there also helps ensure that at least one will be used by a given member, if not all three.
To that end, you can look forward to our soon-to-be-distributed series of 2010/11 STC France Membership Surveys. There will be more than one, but don’t worry, they will be short (no more than 10 questions) and focused on single sets of issues. These surveys will ask you to address these questions and a few more about what steps we should take going forward. I sincerely hope you’ll take the time to respond to these simple, yet very important surveys. In the sixties, there was a buzz-phrase that said, “not to decide is to decide.” It applies as much today as back then. No response to a question or issue could mean certain elimination of resources or programs that seem to have no tangible value.
Takeaway
There are three important things to take away from this adress.
First, and particularly if you are a member, be sure to follow us on Facebook and/or Twitter, and especially join our STC France Linkedin group. The links for all these locations are in the footer of our site. We use these channels to communicate up-to-the-day news and happenings with the chapter. Now that we have a dedicated Community Manager, we will be even better about doing so.
Second, we are still looking for additional volunteers to join our team. We’ll make it more clear soon what specific opportunities exist. In the meantime, if you have any questions, comments, or simply want to put your name on a list of interested people to follow up with, please let us know!
Finally, and again, look for the very important 2010/11 STC France Membership Surveys that we will be distributing soon, and please take the time to fill them out and return them to us. It takes only a few minutes, and it’s one of the most important things you can do to ensure a future of STC France.