GuysBlog

STC offers two glossy magazines with membership: Intercom (ten issues per year) and the quarterly journal, Technical Communication. The former contains society news and announcements and articles about the profession, while the latter seems aimed at the academic community and also has an extensive set of reviews of a lot of topical publications.

Many folks I know who have been technical communicators for more than, say, seven years have said that they find much of what is in Intercom to be aimed more at the beginning technical communicators, and they find the content of “TechComm” too esoteric.

What sorts of articles do you read in other publications (or on the Web), aimed at the more “seasoned” technical communicator, that you’d like to see in our STC publications?

What sorts of topics should be covered? Should we have more theme-based issues, in which most of the articles are on a given topic area?

Should, perhaps, book reviews move to Intercom?

What other ideas for our periodicals come to mind?

The STC is continuing its Transformation. But progress has been rather slow, and communication about the whole process has been spotty.

Now Joe Welinske, who is a senior member of STC and an officer of the Puget Sound chapter, has launched the ReformSTC Yahoo group to discuss how to improve STC.

Since its founding in May it has grown to 187 members and brought forth 259 messages.  A lot of concerns are being aired, and members of the STC’s Board of Directors are engaged in the discussion.  May it be a force for good.

[reposting with spelling correction]

An entry in Dan Gillmor’s blog brings my attention to this entry in Ed Foster’s Gripelog:

Diluted Documentation

Are
IT product vendors deliberately watering down the amount of information
they provide in their documentation? Not only do a growing number of
readers seem to think so, they have some interesting theories as to why
reading the feeble manual no longer does much good.
. . .
Many readers think the main reason for
shortchanging customers on the documentation is to give the vendor a
lucrative aftermarket.
. . .
Another reader, himself a technical editor, had a
somewhat different theory. "This is a by-product of the outsourcing
trend," he wrote.

[One of the comments in Dan’s blog also points us to an article from 1998: "The Death of Documentation."]

Speaking as a reformed software developer — one who spent some 17 years building software and now has spent over 22 years explaining (other) software — I have some other observations. 

(more…)

No wonder Silicon Valley area STC membership took a big drop in recent years.

According to an article by Scott Thurm in the Wall Street Journal of October 8, 2004,

More than half of the people working at technology companies in California in early 2000 had left the technology field or the state by the end of 2003, and more than 40% experienced declining incomes over that period, according to a study on the impact of the tech bust.

The study, by the Sphere Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan Burlingame, Calif., think tank, found that the fate of tech workers during the bust depended largely on whether they stayed employed at a tech firm. Those that did enjoyed rising incomes — up 11% after accounting for inflation. But workers who left tech for other industries saw their wages stagnate or decline. Those who shifted from semiconductor makers to health care, for example, made 31% less in the fourth quarter of 2003, compared with the first quarter of 2000, after accounting for inflation.

…Nearly one-third of the tech workers in California in early 2000 weren’t even working in the state in 1995, and an additional quarter were working at nontech firms. Those who weren’t in tech in 1995 were more likely to leave the industry, or the state, after 2000, the study found

The full text of the article is behind the WSJ subscription wall, but was brought to my attention by a mailing list. A fairly simple Google search turned it up here.

The April-May issue of Sound Off, the newsletter of the Puget Sound chapter of STC, brings two articles that I found interesting:

Certification for technical communicators: The time is now — by Peggy Jacobson
and
Think weird and prosper — by Rahel Bailie.

Peggy opines that it is time (yea, past time) for STC to support certification for technical communicators. She cites other similar organizations that have done so. Why not STC?

Sure, there are lots of different kinds of TCs, but some skills are universal. Also, there can be a baseline certification and the speciality certifications, or some folks might get just the baseline, then a certification in the area of their primary audience, such as Oracle or Microsoft programming.

Rahel quotes from Tom Peters:

“The only way to effect true transformation in the workplace is to enlist the outliers in your organization to your cause. Find the weirdos and the freaks, offer support for the projects they’re secretly pursuing, then get them to help you with your own revolutionary change ideas.”

She recounts how she has used “weirdness” to differentiate herself as a technical communicator and even to defuse road rage.

I wonder how one might apply these two concepts together….

Thanks to Scott Abel, aka The Content Wrangler, for the tip about Peggy’s article which led me to discover Rahel’s.

eFios describes itself as

an independent consultancy company that focuses on implementations of web based collaboration inside the enterprise.

On their weblog page, they recently (well, on 29 December 2003) entered a posting about “STC’s transformation process: blogging for open communication”. [Be patient — it has a slow response time.]

I certainly hope that the STC weblog will be kept up even when its initial purpose is fulfilled. But even if it is not, pieces of it will persist, quoted in other weblogs for some time. Why? Because it reveals an innovative way for an organization to discuss reinventing itself with its members and with the public at large. I know of several weblogs that point to the transformation weblog, and it would be shame to lose this landmark of organizational self-examination.

[Thanks to Smart Meeting Design for pointing this out, and to Bloglines which provided the mechanism for me to subscribe to a search that watches for postings that mention “STC”.]

Lyndsey Amott, dba Docsymmetry, has a great site about technical writing. I wish I’d written it. Lyndsey operates out of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

She has organized the site into the following sections

Great Technical Writing – even if you are not a great writer
Getting a Technical Writing Job, Even If You Have No Experience
A Technical Writing Career … Information for Writers and Employers
Audience Analysis for Technical Writers
Subject-Matter Experts (SMEs)
Mistakes Technical Writers Make
The Technical Writing Process
How to Write Glossaries
Editing Your Own DocumentationTechnical Writing Books
About Docsymmetry
Contact.

There’s so much useful information there, I wish it had a site search capability.

She urges STC membership. [So do I.]

Thanks to darrenbarefoot for the link. See also Darren’s Hall of Technical Writing Wierdness.

Robert Scoble, formerly of Userland but now in the clutc…, er… employ of Microsoft, runs a weblog named The Scobleizer. On December 28, Robert posted on the topic of offshoring.

He has a few nice words for the Silicon Valley Chapter of STC’s web page about offshoring, edited by Fred Sampson, the chapter’s president for 2003-2004.

Robert has some interesting links in his article, and (as of this posting) 30 comments. Many of the comments have links. Grab one of your favorite beverages, settle down, and peruse the lot.

[Thanks, Fred, for the pointer. Thanks, Robert, for the nucleus of this extravaganza.]

A small committee of Board member of the Society for Technical Communication has begun a (TypePad!) weblog about improving the organization — soliciting comments. Each day (so far) has focused on a particular theme.

Monday addressed structure, and has now gathered 93 comments.

Tuesday brought up the ever-popular topic of dues and has 33 comments.

Wednesday was on another finance topic: what are other ways to gain income while serving members, and so far has only 5 comments.

Glad they asked. it’s about time there was widespread discussion about these things — not just chapter and conference bitch sessions. Some excellent ideas are coming forth, as well as some whining.

I’ve added it to my aggregator (BlogLines) and will be paying attention. So are some other STC member and former member bloggers.

Judy Glick-Smith is a former president of the STC. She has embarked on a new venture, called The GlickSmith Group.

In a press release announcing the new organization, she reports (bolding added):

According to the September 1, 2003, issue of CIO Magazine, economists call the changes to the current labor market structural rather than cyclical. This is due to the trend to send work offshore. This trend is permanent, “Well-defined and accepted internal software development and maintenance processes are…key to making an offshore situation work.” Companies considering a move to offshore outsourcing will be more successful in their efforts by defining strategies, processes, and specifications before making the move.

I visited CIO Magazine’s website. Though I have not yet found the article she quoted, I did find an article entitled The Hidden Costs of Offshore Outsourcing that looks to be worthwhile reading.

- - - - -

[later] I looked again. The quote is indeed in that article, about halfway through the doc, just beneath the heading “The Cost of Ramping Up”.