Please join us for our first 2011 Town Hall. We’ll be having a free lunchtime meeting held over conference call. Grab you lunch then dial us up.

We are currently changing our webinar provider, so we’ll be adding call-in information shortly. We wanted to get this post up, so you can save the date.

We’ll have two town hall meetings each month in June, July, and August. We hope you’ll attend all of them!

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!

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.

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