fast turn-around

[cellio]

The administrative-support folks at my company are fabulous. The most recent instance of this comes from a conference I'll be attending this fall. After I finally got an authorizing signature on the relevant form (which took weeks), I asked about implementation. "Oh, [name] will take care of that for you." That was Friday. I now have a hotel registration, a better plane ticket than I'd been able to find on my own, and conference registration, with me not having to do anything more than provide the URL and approve the flight. Nifty. Not that I've done this a lot, but at every past employer I've had to do the leg-work -- and, by the way, buffer some things on my own credit card.

(ACM SIGDOC, the best conference I know of for technical technical writers. I wonder if I know anybody in Memphis, or anyone else who's going.)

Comments

[cahwyguy.livejournal.com]

Has SIGDOC improved? I remember when I was involved with them in the early 1990s, and they had like a 10 page newsletter (this was just about the time I became chair of ACM SIGSAC).

Right now, I'm trying to figure out where ACM, and professional societies in general, fit today. Yes, there are conferences. But are there other purposes for the societies other than putting on the conferences? I know our local ACM chapter is rapidly dying (although we're still at 600 members, we're lucky to get 10 at a meeting, and then 90% of them are over 60!).

Lastly, are you implying that STC is less than useful as an organization? (My wife was involved with the local STC chapter for a while, but hasn't been for ages. She's still involved with SWE, which is a good organization).

[cellio]

I actually haven't been involved with ACM (or the SIG) at a membership level; I'm a leech who just goes to occasional conferences. I, like you, think the role of professional organizations has to be changing (has to have been changing for the last 15 years, really); the world has changed, and the things that were needed then aren't the things that are needed now.

I've only been to one other instance of this conference, in 2000, and it had a high density of useful sessions. It was also a small-enough group that you could actually talk with other attendees usefully; while I'm not very good at the social and networking games, I at least didn't have to fear completely getting lost in the crowd.

I don't find the STC conferences as useful for the kind of writing I do. They seem to be much more focused on end users (whether software, magazine readers, or whatnot), with fewer assumptions about domain knowledge. dr4b and I presented a session on API documentation at a regional STC conference, and not only were we the only API-related session there, but we had a roomful of people who had no clues about API documentation. Granted, it was a regional and not a national conference, but of the ~200 people there, I had really hoped to find someone else doing programmer-level documentation who wasn't from my own company. I've seen the programs from some of the national conferences and that seems to track. (We submitted the same talk to that year's national conference and they offered us one of those sessions where you sit at a table and give a 20-minute presentation to a small group of people. They apparently judged that to be the level of interest in the topic.) STC seems to be going for the broad audience (and has large conferences as a result); the ACM SIG seems to be more focused, and a fair number of the attendees at SIGDOC 2000 were actually engineers rather than technical writers. That's not bad, just different. And, again, I'm mostly looking through the conference lens.

[cellio]

Oh, I should clarify one thing. A manger once described me as a "technical writer, as opposed to a technical writer", and I think that's spot-on. I'm a programmer-type who knows how to write, as opposed to being a writer who knows some programming. Yes, my degree is in technical writing, but my orientation is as I described, and I've found it hard to make connections with similar people in STC. Most tech writers aren't like me, so that's not too surprising. :-)

[cahwyguy.livejournal.com]

However, my wife was exactly like you: BS degree in Engineering from CSUN, who happened to be a writer.

She went to the mommy track when our daughter was born and any part time true technical stuff dried up (although I'm sure she would listen for contracting gigs).