For our August Town Hall meeting, we are going to start the hour by giving you an overview of the bylaws that we (the Chapter board) are proposing. In the September business meeting, chapter members will be voting to adopt the bylaws for the chapter. This town hall is your opportunity to hear what the bylaws are, and how they will affect you as a chapter member (or as a non-chapter participant in chapter activities).

All are invited to join the town hall (regardless of your location or membership status); chapter members should attend to have an opportunity to provide feedback before the vote actually occurs in September.

We will also discuss details regarding the September business meeting, including the format and how you can participate.

As with all our town halls, the format for this meeting is casual. We will begin the hour discussing the chapter bylaws and business meeting, but we will follow wherever the discussion leads us. Call in with your questions about the topic, or about anything else!

See you on the call! Please register below to get the conference call information, and to let us know you are planning to attend.

Please join the Intermountain Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication for our July Town Hall webinar. This free event is a lunchtime conference call where we will be discussing the topic of technical writer portfolios.

Everybody is welcome to join us; you don’t have to be a member of our chapter, or even live in our area.

Town Hall meetings follow a very relaxed format. Generally we start discussing the specified topic for the month, but we follow where the discussion goes. If you have questions or simply want to interact with other technical communicators, please join us.

Let us know that you are interested in the event by registering for the event using the form below. When you register, you will get an e-mail with a personalized link you can use to join the conference. You’ll also have the option to add the calendar item to your Outlook calendar.

We look forward to talking to you on July 21st!

Attention Intermountain Chapter members!

On September 17, 2010 we will hold our annual business meeting. This annual meeting is required by STC bylaws, and will be a place where we conduct official business of the chapter.

This year, we will hold the business meeting at a restaurant. Everybody is welcome, but only current chapter members will be able to vote on chapter business.

As we get closer to the event, we’ll post the location and the agenda, however we already know the most important item of business will be adopting new chapter bylaws. Our chapter has never officially adopted bylaws. Ben Minson (immediate past president) and myself (current chapter president) are working on creating bylaws for our chapter. We will present these bylaws for a vote at the business meeting.

Please make every effort to attend this meeting, as it is a time that you get to make your voice heard.

More details will be provided closer to the event.

Please join us on Tuesday June 29th for our next phone conference-based Town Hall meeting.

We will discuss Tech Writer Certification, as it was announced at the recent STC Summit conference in Dallas.

Use the form below to reserve your spot, and let us know you’ll be attending:

We are using DimDim as our web conference provider, and technically, things went smoothly with one exception. Apparently you cannot record the phone bridge conversation. If you want to record the meeting, you have to have all your attendees use the VOIP (using headphones and microphones attached to their computer) feature. And if people are connected via VIOP, they cannot be heard on the conference call. So you have to have everybody use either VOIP or phone bridge. For next month, we’ll try to work out some of those kinks so things run even better.

The down side of that glitch is that we didn’t get a recording of today’s meeting. Next month, I’ll use my computer’s microphone to pick up the speaker phone audio, which should at least provide SOME ability to record the call.

Speaking of next month, I’m about to schedule our next town hall. In June we are going to be discussing STC Certification. We’ll talk about what it is, why it matters, and what you need to know. We’ll also have an open forum where you can bring your own questions or comments to the table.

Please remember — you don’t need to be a member of the chapter to join in our conference call (one of our participants today was not a chapter member). This town hall is open to all technical communicators who want to participate.

See you next month. Watch the site for a date and time announcement.

Location:

Walden Park
5425 S. Murray Parkway Ave (1070 W)
Murray, UT (map)

When: Friday, May 21, 6:30PM

Please join us for our May social. We will be having a chapter BBQ at Walden Park in Murray. The chapter will provide meat, buns, drinks, and utensils. The rest of the food will be pot-luck.

All are invited. You do not need to be a member to attend. Please invite your friends and co-workers that have an interest in technical communication. The event is free for everybody, and we hope you bring your family. The park has a playground, BBQ pits, electricity, and sand volleyball.

Please RSVP using the link below:

http://www.evite.com/pages/invite/viewInvite.jsp?inviteId=YDLUROXEVXELNUKMVDNR

If you have questions, please call chapter president Paul Pehrson at 801-938-8391.

First STC-Intermountain Town Hall held May 26

Hey Intermountain STC chapter members! The chapter has scheduled the first Intermountain Chapter Town Hall, and we invite you to attend.

This is your chance to interact with your chapter leadership. Ask the chapter board any question you want. We’ll do our best to answer it. Come with a problem that you are facing in your work, and see if others on the call have a solution to the problem you are facing.

We plan to hold these town halls regularly. Feel free to comment on this post to say how frequently they would be useful to you. Would you like to see an open forum like this on a monthly basis, or on a quarterly basis?

Please join us on Wednesday May 26th during lunch (12:00 MDT) to discuss whatever it is that you want to talk about.

Please register for this meeting by entering your e-mail address in the form below. You will receive a personalized invitation to attend the meeting, which will include the call-in number and participant code for the meeting.

There will also be a recording of the meeting available for those of you who can’t attend in person.

After you have registered, don’t forget to add this meeting to your calendar so you don’t forget to join us. We look forward to hearing from you.

Photo courtesy of Duplicon on Flickr

I am fortunate enough to have an employer that sets aside funds for each of us to attend a professional development conference, which is why I’m able to be here at STC Summit. I came with Ben Minson (our outgoing chapter president) and Tom Johnson (our chapter webmaster). At the conference I also ran into Greg Barrus, our vice-president-elect.

Ben and I attended Leadership Day, which occurs the day before the main conference. I loved leadership day! The atmosphere was very casual and inviting, and I gained a lot of great insight into running our chapter.

I want our chapter to work towards getting a chapter recognition next year at Summit, so I’m going to be working with our chapter board to prepare a program that will help us meet that goal. I believe that as we work towards getting a chapter recognition we will be providing more value to our chapter members, so I hope you will join me in working towards that goal.

Another goal that I have that is an outgrowth from Leadership Day is for our chapter to sponsor one or more web conferences. We will pay our presenter, and we will charge a nominal fee for members (slightly more for non-members), but we’ll charge enough to make a small profit for the chapter. (I’m thinking $15 for a member and $25 for a non-member with a $100 speaker fee — but those are just some initial thoughts; your input is more than welcome!) I’d like to market the webinar outside our chapter, so we can get members from all reaches of the globe who are invited to attend the session. If you are interested in this type of event, please let me know. And if you would like to be involved in planning something like this, make sure you get a hold of me so that we can work together to make this happen.

I think more than anything I learned two things from leadership day: (1) The society is alive and doing very well; and (2) the society-level board is made up of some awesome people.

First, I want to reassure our chapter members that the global STC organization is doing very well. I offer my sincere thanks and congratulations to our outgoing global board for their hard work in weathering the financial crisis of the last year. The organization as a whole is doing very well, and I think that with the changes that they have implemented and are implementing, we are going to see a stronger global organization that will be more capable of meeting the needs of our global membership.

Second, I want you to know that we have some great people on the society-level board. As members, we had the opportunity to elect these leaders, and frankly, I think we’ve done a great job. These board members are high-class people who are exceptionally friendly and are willing to bend over backwards to find out what we, the general membership, want. Remember, these society-level board members are just regular members  themselves who are volunteering to serve the society as a whole, and after rubbing shoulders with them for the last couple of days, I can assure you that I believe they are doing the best job they can. They are working hard, and they solicit your feedback. As members, I encourage you to contact the Society board and express your concerns and propose solutions that you would like to see. You can find contact information for the entire board at: http://www.stc.org/about/board-of-directors.asp .

Well, I didn’t intend to write a novel, but I want you to know that I have confidence in our organization. I’m excited to be a member of STC right now, and I’m thrilled to be our next chapter president. I hope we can work together to make this an amazing year. It will be as we come together as a team that we are able to make this organization stronger and help shape it into the organization that we want it to become.

I’m sitting right now with 13 fellow chapter members listening to Grant Skousen’s presentation at our October meeting.

I thought I’d give you my thoughts on the meeting, for those of you who are unable to be here tonight. This is sort of a “live-blog” post, so you will get some stream of consciousness thoughts. They probably don’t all connect like a normal, finished article.

Grant is talking about design and data; how you should design your products and where you get the data from on which you base your design.

I really like Grant’s emphasis on having writers involved early in the design process. As writers, we have a broader perspective, sometimes, than do the developers. Grant included several quotes that all point to the idea that you have to design your product with the end users in mind. You need to totally understand how your users think, how they work, and what they want.

He discussed contextual design: watching the users actually do the task, then figuring out how you can make the task easier for them.

It would be interesting to see writers involved early in the design phase. It seems that the interaction designers or the developers don’t want to include writers early on, because they think all we do is write the help docs when the product is almost done. But if we could really sell our value earlier in the process, we could make a difference in ensuring the product is adequately designed for the end user.

I hope Grant will let us post his slides of the meeting afterward. He had some great quotes and content that you might be interested in, even if you weren’t here.

“What is the most ignored paradox in software development? Every time you add something you take something away. Screen real estate, interface quality… [etc...]”

“To innovate does not necessarily mean to expand; very often it means to simplify.” (M. Russell Ballard)

“With the right amount of user data, you can help get things designed for the user.” (Grant Skousen)

Tom Johnson asks an interesting question: does this idea of simplifying apply to documentation as well, or are we just talking about the interface itself? Grant’s answer is that as you simplify the product, you can simplify the documentation. Complex products require complex documentation. However, simple apps don’t require complex documentation, because they are so much easier to use.

Ben Minson asks how do you determine how many users to watch? Grant says it depends on your budget, but generally, you watch until you can see emerging patterns that repeat. Then you have an idea of where you need to focus your efforts.

In wrap-up, thanks to Marj, Kurt, Greg, Bruce, Deloris, Ben, Ann, Lisa, Mandy, Tom, Lynn, and Shawn for attending our meeting. A special thanks to our presenter, Grant Skousen, for an informative and interesting discussion on user experience design.

(Get the slides.)