Prez Talk

The air around the Hilton at Chennai bore a sense of expectation from December 1st to 3rd this year. There were excellent reasons. For the next 3 days, Hilton was to witness a congregation of technical writers, editors, managers, instructional designers, web designers, usability engineers, and more, to participate in the 13th STC Annual Conference. With 250 delegates from various companies like  Infosys, Qualcomm,Adp, Cadence, Progress software, Nokia Siemens Network, Dell, Oracle, Fidelity, Avaya, NetApp, and various others coming under the same roof, it was destined to be special, and it turned out to be so.  The conference was sponsored by Adobe, Author-it Corp, Citec, Contentmarket, Oracle, Vestas and Madcap.

Pre-Conference workshop on December 1st:

Six workshops of 3 hours each took place on December 1st. A mixture of both project management and tools workshops enabled the participants to pick and choose. Close to 80 people attended the pre-conference workshops.

Conference opening on December 2nd:

The following morning, December 2nd, saw quite an unexpected turnout of technical communicators. The organizers were stunned to see the last minute registrations. After the STC India President delivered the address keynote speech, P Kiranmayee enlightened the gathering with her talk on the vision of technical communication.
It would be unfair for me to talk about all the conference presentations because I have managed to attend only a few. But the general feedback from participants was that the conference presentations helped them identify the business aspects of technical writing and laid a path for technical writers to analyse those issues in real-life scenarios.
After that it was the time to put on the dancing shoes at the networking and cocktail dinner.

Final Day Conference Activities

The final day of the conference had presentations on Minimalism, Managing Localization, Workflows in Architecture, Conditional Text in DITA, Making the transition into content management and lots more. I was able to attend couple of sessions on the final day and each of one the topics had so many take aways.

Everyone was geared up to witness the all-important panel discussion comprising stalwarts like Francisco A, Sandhya Ravishankar, Uday C, Giridhar B, Latha S,  which was moderated by Gyanesh T and Nandini Gupta. Each of the panellists threw light on the following areas: How to create exam objectives and decide their weight? What are some common guidelines for drafting the questions?, Does one require instructional designing experience to create exams?, How to decide about the format and level of difficulty of questions? And how to go about writing and reviewing the questions while maintaining their confidentiality as much as possible?

Conclusion

Amidst all this knowledge sharing, the conference was a hub for companies to set up their stalls, not only to promote their companies, but also to solicit feedback from the delegates. In addition, there were organized contests and a number of awards to give away. The 13th STC Annual Conference at Chennai proved to be a showcase for sharing knowledge and dispersing the diversity of technical communication.

I take this opportunity to acknowledge the efforts of a multitude of STC India volunteers and chapter officers in continuing to support our activities and initiatives.
Here’s wishing all a prosperous 2012!