Prez Talk

It gives me immense pleasure to invite all of you to attend the 13th STC India Annual Conference in Chennai on December 1, 2 and 3. Registrations for the much-awaited annual conference have started. This year’s agenda has been created with high precision, taking into account the feedback we received on the past STC India conferences. Our judges have painstakingly chosen papers that show the promise to serve your various knowledge needs effectively. No surprise, this year’s agenda covers topics that have never or rarely been presented in the past STC India conferences.

Please visit the following link to register for the conference:

http://www.stc-india.org/conferences/2011/?page_id=6

We have six pre-conference workshops that will provide training in topics ranging from Project Management to S1000D. The tools workshops will be on Author-it, FrameMaker and RoboHelp; these will be hands-on sessions with computers. We are planning the logistics requirements accordingly. Participation certificates will be issued to the attendees after the completion of the pre-conference workshops.

We will have the distinguished journalist and ace presenter of NDTV Hindu,  Sanjay Pinto, as the conference chief guest. Sanjay was the Bureau Chief of NDTV 24×7 before taking on the editorial mantle of NDTV-Hindu. As a news hound, Sanjay has over the last decade and a half covered every possible beat:  Politics, Courts, Crime, Sports, Entertainment, Business & Environment. Sanjay will be addressing the gathering on December 2 on Communication Ethics and its role in our society.

The main conference days will witness 34 presentations by seasoned technical communication professionals. A couple of the topics that we will get a chance to listen include user interface design, documentation for cloud,  managing localization in Author-it, publishing DITA content to Wiki, collaboration with customer support, and so on. In addition, we will have two panel discussions.

On December 2, Jaya Choudhary will moderate a panel discussion – Is the increasing advent of never ending list of tools decreasing the growth of technical writers. The following day Gyanesh Talwar and Nandini Gupta will moderate a panel discussion on Creating Online Certification Exam. This discussion will try to explore some of the questions like setting up exam objectives and deciding their weight and format and level of difficulty of questions.

A vote of thanks to all the speakers who have sent us their proposals. We received close to 80 proposals this year. We expect the same enthusiasm in the following years. Last but not the least, a big thank to you our conference sponsors- Adobe, Author-it Corporation, Citec, Contented, Madcap, Vestas, Oracle, Black & White, Collargroup and many others. Keep supporting us!

I have thoroughly enjoyed the previous year’s conference, and I am sure you must have done the same. The STC India Chapter is looking forward to meet all of you shortly, and I am sure you would love to take advantage of the professional development on offer.

See you at the 13th Annual Conference.