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

[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.