Articles
STC France AGM 2010: Re-imagining our future
5 November 2010
Stuart Culshaw
Immediate Past President
STC France
At the STC France AGM on Sept 28, we looked back on recent chapter successes and highlighted a number of challenges that our community is currently facing. In short, we are a successful community, but we have “issues”. We’re working to address some of these issues, but we’re going to need more member participation to keep the momentum going. Read on to find out how you can get involved.
Many of the issues currently facing the STC France community were discussed in Ray Gallon’s recent article Time for Change: Reinventing STC France. These include the need to recruit more volunteers to help with ongoing chapter activities and attract more attendees to our community events, the challenge of developing (and maintaining) a bilingual chapter website, to encourage more chapter members contribute content on a regular basis to the chapter website, and the need to get a clearer picture of the profile and professional development requirements of our chapter members.
Celebrating our Successes
As the STC France Chapter gets ready to celebrate its 20th anniversary, the good news is that our membership is growing, our ties with academia are stronger than ever, and we have acquired a solid experience in organizing successful conferences and professional training events.
The lively group of members and non members that attended this year’s AGM meeting is also testament to our growing momentum and a great source of optimism. Our plans for the coming year were met with interest and enthusiasm. Our challenge now is to transform that enthusiasm into action.
Ray Gallon, incoming STC France chapter president, and the chapter leadership team began the evening with a look back at the highlights of our 2009-10 chapter year. These highlights included our most successful chapter conference ever, the launch of our student mentoring program, and recognition of our efforts by the Society in the form of an STC Chapter Pacesetter award.
STC France membership manager, Keith Jackson, provided an analysis and breakdown of our current membership, which includes this year a large influx of student members from Paris Diderot University. Chapter treasurer Robert Adlington reported on our healthy financial situation and on the new STC zero-based budgeting process recently introduced as part of STC’s financial recovery plan. Clio Fouque (chapter vice president and secretary) and Ray also provided information about STC France’s student mentoring program that was launched at Content Strategy Forum 2010.
The future of STC
In addition to his new role as France Chapter President, Ray is also a member of the STC Community Affairs Committee, representing STC’s many international chapters. Ray shared his enthusiasm about STC’s recently announced Project Phoenix, an ongoing initiative that promises to shift the focus from “STC the organization” to “STC as a collection of services and delivery channels that meet the professional needs of our members.” Ray also commended the STC board’s efforts in seeing the Society safely through the recent financial crisis, one of the most serious challenges in its history. STC is on the road to recovery and many changes are planned to strengthen the society and improve member value in the near future.
Ray compared the work of the international STC board to reinvent the Society with the STC France Chapter leadership team’s own plans to rethink and renew our approach and commitment to member value. Part of this renewal involves the introduction of a new international affiliation agreement between our community and the Society. Look out for more information on this initiative in the near future.
Content Strategy Forum 2010: What Next?
While Content Strategy Forum 2010 (Slides / Photos / Videos / Buzz) was a hugely successful event, both for our community, and for the emerging field of Content Strategy, we are very much aware of the exceptional nature of the event — and the huge effort that went into pulling it off. Planning, promoting and executing an event of this size stretched our small team to the limit. Our other chapter programs and initiatives suffered as a result.
This year, we are not going to attempt to top the Content Strategy Forum 2010 event. Instead we want to focus our efforts on developing interaction and participation among our members and expand our chapter activities and community programs. We also want to spend more time discussing issues that directly affect technical communicators in their day-to-day professional lives.
Stuart Culshaw, France Chapter Immediate Past President, presented some of the leadership team’s ideas to encourage more participation at face-to-face meetings while offering more opportunity for involvement for members based outside of the Paris region. We hope to do this by varying the format and timing of our meetings, introducing new delivery channels (including online meetings and webinars) and provide recordings/podcasts of our face-to-face meetings for those unable to attend on the day.
An “Unconference” for 2011
We’re looking to make our 2011 chapter conference a far more interactive and informal event. To that end, we will be organizing it along the lines of a “Barcamp”, or “unconference”. For those unfamiliar with this type of event, a barcamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. A successful barcamp is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants who are the main actors of the event.
Ad-hoc does not mean unplanned and chaotic, however. Early discussions have us favoring a “hybrid” event that will include a number of presentations by invited experts, as well as more informal contributions from participants and chapter members. We’re looking for volunteers to help us lay the groundwork, develop branding and a logo for the event, help us promote to and network with potential participants, identify and “sell” the event to potential sponsors, get t-shirts and other conference goodies printed and delivered.
Go to barcamp.org for more information about the format, rules, and examples of successful barcamps, check out the history of barcamps on Wikipedia, or read this article by Crystal Williams on Ten Steps to Organizing a Barcamp, or this article by Pamela Poole on Organizing a Barcamp. This article by Dawn Foster also provides a good overview of Community Organized Unconferences and Barcamps
The success of this initiative will depend on participation from many people in our community, so if you’re interested and would like to join the organizing team, get in touch today!
Member events
In addition to the annual chapter conference, we shared a number of other ideas for meeting formats and themes and invited suggestions and input from attendees. Below is a list of some of the ideas discussed. If you’d like to help transform any of these ideas into reality, then get in touch!
Minibars
To familiarize our members with the Barcamp concept and provide more participative community events, we’re planning to organize one or more miniature barcamps (“minibars”) throughout the year. Participants will be encouraged to suggest topics for discussion at the start of the event and then vote on those they are most interested in exploring. The three most popular topics will be selected and either discussed in turn, or participants will split into several groups and discuss them in parallel, with each group sharing the outcome of their discussion with other attendees at the end of the event.
Many of those present at the AGM were enthusiastic about this idea, including Pamela P., who likened this type of event to the Open Coffee Club, regular informal meetings between entrepreneurs, investors, developers, consultants, lawyers, journalists, and others working in the Internet field (in Paris: Every Thursday from 10h-12h at Elgi, 10 Rue Saint-Marc, 75002.
Regular minibars could also provide a framework for coordinating more in-depth research projects within small groups. The idea here is to appoint a leader to head up a team of people interested in researching a specific theme. Team members commit to meet/discuss once a week for a period of two months and to collate their findings into a deliverable/report which can be presented at a future meeting and shared with the rest of the community. Interested? Get in touch!
Wake up!
We announced plans at the AGM for a new series of breakfast meetings as an alternative to our usual evening events. Scheduled between 8h30 and 10h in central Paris, these “Wake Up!” events combine breakfast and an informal presentation by a leading industry professional, and still allow participants to make it to the office for that mid-morning meeting!
The first of these events took place on 28 October at La Cantine with Lisa Welchman, a leading proponent of web governance and a wonderful speaker. Lisa was kind enough to offer her time to STC France members as she was passing through Paris on her way to speak at the J. Boye conference in Denmark.
Wake Up! with Lisa Welchman: The Digital Deca: 10 Management Truths for the Web Age, provided great insight into managing one’s brand and online presence effectively. Lisa provided plenty of practical advice on how web teams should work to develop relations with different functions across the company and the importance of getting buy-in from senior management on the importance of improving the experience for users of the company’s website. Much of Lisa’s advice could apply equally to technical writers and tech writing departments in their bid to develop recognition and show the value of what they do.
Although we were only a small group for this first “Wake Up!” presentation, we’d like to think this was mostly due to the affect of the industrial strike action announced that day, and the fact the event happened to fall during the Toussaints holiday — rather than our member’s inability to get out of bed early!
We’re going to give this format another try before drawing any conclusions, so plan on setting your alarm early on the morning of Tuesday 9 Nov. We’ll be welcoming back Tony Self from HyperWrite, all the way from Australia, who, like Lisa, has also offered to share his morning coffee and his experience with STC France members on his way to present at a conference (DITA Europe) later in the month.
Wake Up! with Tony Self: Writing for Readers who Can’t Read on Tuesday 9 Nov from 8h30-10h00 at the Café du Pont Neuf (14 quai du Louvre, Paris 1e, metro Pont Neuf) promises to be a real eye-opener! At the STC France Annual Conference in Paris 18 months ago, Tony suggested that a new generation of people entering the workforce will have a limited ability to read anything other than short texts. If he is right, and the future readers of our user assistance can’t read as we do, how are we going to write for such an audience? In this session, Tony returns to the subject and proposes techniques that we can adopt to write for readers who cannot read.
Click here to learn more and to register. STC members: 10€, Non-members: 15€ (price includes continental breakfast).
On.Site
One of the challenges we face as event organizers is finding affordable, convenient locations that are suitable for hosting our meetings. Does your company have offices in or around Paris (preferably close to a metro line) where we could host a breakfast or early evening meeting? In exchange, you and your colleagues (writers/engineers/marketing people) get to attend free, while other participants can attend for a small fee. You don’t have to go out of your way to attend, and we can propose a theme that is of direct relevance to you and your company. If you think this might be possible where you work, please talk to your manager, or send us their details so we can discuss options. Get in touch today!
Net.Works
To develop our ties with other organizations and professional associations, we’re interested in inviting speakers from related disciplines to come to speak at an STC meeting, or organize joint meetings to share costs/speakers. Are you a member of such an organization? Are you interested in the mutual benefits that such an exchange could bring? Get in touch!
Summit @ aClick
All sessions from the Technical Communication Summit 2010 (STC’s Annual Conference) in Dallas, TX were recorded (video and/or audio). We’d like to organize one or more group meetings to share these recorded sessions, coupled with a group discussion on the topic. We’ll send out a shortlist of selected sessions for members to choose from and will schedule a meeting around the topic that gets the most votes.
JobBooster
Given the current state of the economy, many of our members are struggling to find employment or clients. Recent graduate and those just entering the profession are looking for assistance with finding their first job or assignment. We would like to organize JobBooster sessions to help people develop their interview skills, improve their CV, learn how to work better with recruiters, …
Tools of the trade
Elisa R. was keen to see members provide software training on the tools they use in their day jobs to other members, or share strategies or solutions they have found to issues in the workplace. We have already received requests for help and advice on setting up a documentation department, implementing DITA, and more.
Sarah H. was interested in learning more about tools and techniques outside of the technical communicator’s standard kit. More and more of us have opportunities to contribute to multimedia projects. It’s no longer just about writing. Members would like to know more about developing effective graphics, training videos, and multimedia presentations.
Do you have expertise in any of these areas? Would you be willing to share your knowledge and advice with other STC France members and help them address any of these issues? Get in touch!
Mentor-Mentee Meetups
The STC France student mentoring program launched earlier this year is already a victim of its own success. We are currently in short supply of mentors to provide support and guidance to students and recent graduates of the technical writing program at Paris Diderot University. We would also like to extend the mentoring program to students from Rennes 2 and others, but we need more of our more experienced members to step forward and offer their help.
To learn more about the benefits of the mentoring program for both mentees and mentors, we’d like to organize one or meetings during the year to enable program participants to share their experience with the community. Would you be up for it? Get in touch!
Other Program Ideas
In addition to the event ideas discussed above, there are many other activities that the chapter could undertake to support and develop the technical communication profession in France. We discussed the following ideas at the AGM meeting, but we need your help to progress these ideas further…
Professional Outreach
Several AGM attendees thought it would be useful to propose some Technical communication training to engineers, perhaps as a module within their educational programs. Many engineers are not taught anything about usability, writing, or technical communication. Someone suggested that offering to proofread an engineer’s work placement report (rapport de stage) would be a great way to show them the value of good technical communication!
STC members could also offer assistance to students from the CDMM course at Paris Diderot (or other courses) in preparing for their soutenance, helping them with their presentation skills or research report.
Members could also assist students in producing a research paper and/or article and submitting it to one of STC’s professional publications “Technical Communication” (http://www.stc.org/pubs/techcommGeneral01.asp) or “Intercom” (http://intercom.stc.org/).
All these initiatives would provide ways for experienced members of our community to share their knowledge and skills for the benefit of others, and the profession as a whole. Does this sound like something you’d like to try? Get in touch!
State of the Profession in France
One attendee suggested proposing a revised text to improve the French ROME classification for technical writing, similar to the ongoing action by STC in the US to update the entry for technical writer in the Bureau of Labor Statistics job classification.
Another attendee suggested that STC France could also offer guidance/resources on cultural differences in communication and working practices in France. Something to think about!
Localize!
While most STC France members speak both French and English, information on our chapter website and most of our events have traditionally been provided in English only. With the increasing number of French native members in the chapter, and our desire to cater more for French audiences, we identified some time ago the need to make our website and events available in French too.
Keith Jackson is heading up a special project, in collaboration with students from Paris Diderot University, to translate the STC France website. Destry Wion, our web manager, is working on implementing a multilingual plugin module on the website to make it possible to provide the website in French and English, and we are looking to put in place a sustainable process where new content can also be translated into French on a timely basis.
Several participants showed a keen interest in helping Keith speed things up. This would be a HUGE step forward for the chapter and would also offer a great opportunity for those involved to showcase their skills.
Are you interested in helping us to localize our website and offer more resources in French? Contactez nous !
Getting to Know Each Other
To help us get a better picture of our current membership and the issues that you are most interested in, the chapter leadership team will be conducting a series of short online surveys over the coming months. The first of these surveys was conducted in September/October and we will be using the insight gained to orient our future event and program choices. Look out for more details of this first survey coming soon.
While we have presented and discussed a wide variety of ideas here, we don’t have the time or resources to put all these ideas into practice. With your help and participation, however, we can certainly make a start. Tell us what you want. This is your professional community. Let’s get involved, get to know each other, and get to work!