[Dec 2010] Prez Talk

– Michelle Cherian

Its December and Christmas is almost upon us, and so is a brand new year 2011 fast approaching. A whole new STC India administration council will also take charge of our chapter and take the next steps forward! We do have a few new faces in our council next year, but we do encourage you to volunteer and help us grow and take the chapter to greater heights.

It has been a busy year for the STC India chapter with lots of activities through the year – learning sessions, regional conferences, webinars, blogs, annual conferences, SIG sessions and discussions, competitions, and mentoring program to name a few. Our recent successful annual conference at Delhi in November which attracted close to 250 delegates was a huge achievement for us, with the largest number of proposals and workshops received and enabled us to offer a wide variety of topics to the participant. Many of our overseas presenters and visitors had last minute visa problems which resulted in some cancellations, but a few of them arranged replacement speakers to share their presentations with all of us, and fill in the gaps. Our greatest challenge was planning the whole conference from way down south in Bangalore, and we thank our program manager Promila and our event manager Soumendra for ensuring the smooth sailing of the conference from Delhi.

In this complex world we live in, we need to wear so many hats. In my case, its mother, wife, daughter, sister, daughter in law, aunt, niece, grand daughter, technical writer, STC India chapter President. I am sure I  have missed a few of the hats. In each situation we play a different role and have to make a different impact. In our professional lives, being a volunteer with STC gives you an opportunity to work with other technical communicators in the industry and not just be limited to your team and your company. You get to share your skills and learn so much from seniors and juniors in the industry. In the bargain, you make good friends as well!

The first place that you can contribute is to this wonderful magazine of ours – INDUS. Thanks a million to Anagha and our INDUS team for the great job of timely publishing every two months! That’s really a commendable job! Every issue has been interesting and exciting and easily accessible online.

This year many technical communicators asked me why we concentrate so much only on the software industry considering there are so many genres of technical communication. We have tried to bring in the additional scope through our SIGs and leaning sessions on Corporate Communication and Instructional Design and Usability. But there still are a lot of domains that we do not cover. We do encourage you to help us identify communicators who can help us build the scope of the topics that we cover under our umbrella of STC India activities, we have a lot to do on the Education front as well as widening the scope of our activities.

We will continue in the coming year to build the capabilities of our portal, so that we can reach more communicators across the world. We encourage you to use these free services so that we interact more with one another.

Christmas is the time for giving and sharing, lets plan on what we can share with others under the STC India banner next year! All it takes is a little planning and some of your precious time to share with the rest of the fraternity.

A huge thank you to all our volunteers this year, especially our city representatives and SIG leaders who kept our lists and our activities going throughout the country. We do hope we will get many more dedicated volunteers in the coming year.

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous new year 2011!!

In the words of Edith Lovejoy Pierce:

“We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.”

About the author:

Michelle Cherian is the STC India Chapter President, and can be contacted via email.