2004-10-08 - Field Trip - Digital Print Shop Visit

For STC France's October 2004 member meeting, we visited OPAG, a Paris-based digital print company. M. Patrice Quiqueret showed us this relatively new technology...

---Résumé en français par Caroline Dannoux... Read on for English text ...
Incroyable ! La démonstration par l'équipe de Monsieur Quiqueret est flagrante : une machine qui se cale en 4, 5 tirages, une qualité imprimerie qui sort en quelques secondes sous nos yeux.

Les possibilités sont à mon sens largement méconnues et pourtant, si j'avais pu bénéficier de l'imprimerie numérique en start-up il y a 10 ans ! Plus de stockage, plus de rupture de stock, plus de centaines d'invendus alors que l'on travaille déjà sur la release suivante...

Tout cela grâce à un devis traité via internet dans l'heure et une production dans la journée. Pas de limitation de support ni de qualité. De plus, OPAG traite les devis les plus simple (par exemples moins de 10 copies) jusqu'aux commandes complexes de ses grands clients - entreprises, grands magasins, modistes, éditeurs... Une flexibilité et un potentiel à ne plus ignorer.

Today, printing technology has become more direct (fewer steps are required to set up the presses) due to the addition of electronics. This allows for fast turnaround, in many cases same day printing. OPAG is open from 06h00 to 22h00. They can provide quotes in a few hours.

We saw four variations of digital printing:

1) Kovor press: A traditional four-colour offset press (oversize A2 paper format). The digital part is in the pre-press, where the image of the page to be printed is engraved on four plates (one for each colour: cyan, yellow, magenta, black) with a laser. Because the electronics used to engrave the plates are designed to provide a repeatable output, the quality of the lithographic process is much more consistent compared with previous techniques. This printing method requires setup time, but provides the highest quality and best price for a large number of copies (more than 500).

2) Heidelberg QuickMaster DI: A four-colour digital offset press. Its method of operation is similar to the above press, but is much more compact (it prints oversize A3 format paper). It takes a PDF file, engraves its own plates, and robotically sets itself up. As such, it is marketed as a Digital Press, though offset presses are called 'permanent master' in reference to the engraved plates that always print the same page, until they are changed. Due to high degree of automation built in to this press, it allows for quick setup, and therefore shorter production runs.

3) HP Indigo UltraStream: This is what I found was the real revolution in digital printing. The speed and quality of offset printing without a permanent master. Now electrography replaces the engraved plates. In electrography a laser beam on a photosensitive plate drum creates a latent image. The image is then "developed" by depositing (or misting) liquid toner onto the drum in four separate passes for cyan, yellow, magenta, and black.

Because there is no longer a permanent master, this press is called Computer-to-Print as the printing plate is exposed from scratch for each new impression. Computer-to-Print is a purely digital printing technology and it allows for personalization (every page can be different). In the 10 minutes we looked at this press running, the operator ran three jobs for different customers. One of the jobs was name place cards for the seating at a reception.

Description: The HP Indigo UltraStream provides offset quality photo-realistic output. As there is no master plate (which is the case with offset), this is called Computer-to-Print. Like an ordinary office printer, it allows every page to be different. Short runs of full colour books, brochures, and flyers can thus be economically produced.

Click here for full specifications.

4) Ink Jet printer: OPAG has two ink jet printers that are big versions of the printer you use at home. Fine nozzles spray four ink colours onto to the paper surface for a photo-quality result. There is no permanent master. These printers are very slow, and as such are ideally suited to low volume, large format jobs. The larger of these two printers can print 2 meters wide by up to 30 meters in length; ideal for posters and convention booth displays.

Other services we saw included binding, plastification, and cutting. Here is a picture of a cutter press.

About Pantone: The Pantone colour matching system accurately specifies a spot colour to be printed based on the colour swatches found in the Pantone colour book. This system works by mixing specific ratios of inks according to a formula. An engraved plate is made for the Pantone colour. Most modern colour presses are made for four colours (cyan, yellow, magenta, black). If you are doing a four-colour job plus a Pantone colour, the paper must be fed through the press a second time to apply the Pantone colour. As such the Pantone colour becomes expensive because of the extra setup time required - the press needs to cleaned of the previous colour to make it ready for the Pantone colour, then after the job it must be cleaned of the Pantone colour.

Cost-saving colour matching fact: Modern presses allow the colour balance to be easily tweaked. Work with your printer to have them match the printed output to a Pantone colour.

We would like to thank M. Patrice Quiqueret for his time and for showing us his enthusiasm for his trade.

OPAG
49 boulevard du Général Martial Valin
75015 Paris
France

2004-10-21 - STC TAC Conference Report, Munich

Event report by Kevin Journeaux...

Overview of the conference
As the conference runs for two days, there is far more bonding. People get to know each other much better and develop a strong sense of cohesion. This should not be under-estimated. itl (the host for the event in Munich - http://www.itl.de/) is a superb sponsor; they gave us all going away pressies including a mug, t-shirt and chocolate. They supplied space, staff, and support (photocopies, burnt CD-Rs for everyone...).

For more information about the conference, see http://www.stc-transalpine.org/tac/

Structured FrameMaker
If you work in an environment where you are using structured documentation, based on a DTD, this speaker explains how to use FrameMaker V7.1 to enforce the use of a DTD, and reduce editing/compliance-checking costs.

Thomas Bergerhoff, consultant at itl, will tell us about the special user interface that enforces structured documents. With this feature of the latest FrameMaker version, DTDs become part of the process, instead of being an afterthought that requires a lot of extra fitting after the fact.

The presentation will concentrate on the methods and benefits of using a structured editing environment, rather than on the specifics of the FrameMaker version, so all of us may learn something useful.

The Picture Trap: Image Management in Multilingual Documentation
If you do localization in many languages, and you need to keep track of say 60 screenshots in 10 languages, this speaker has put together software to make this much easier.

Nick Rosenthal, managing director of Salford Translations Ltd, will tell us about the problems involved in managing the image materials in multilingual documents. Management is straightforward for one foreign language with five screen shots. But what about a project involving ten to fifteen languages, with three manuals for each language (QSG, User Guide, Network Guide), and fifty different localized graphics in each manual? At that point, some form of formalized management is needed. The presentation will show how Nick's company wrestled with the problem and finally produced a software tool to help address this aspect of localization (SQL server back-end, web-based front-end). Rather than trying to sell his product, Nick will enable us to learn from the mistakes that were made on the road toward his solution.

Anatomy of a Flash Training Movie
This speaker chose a very ambitious presentation, thus showing that Flash requires both skill and time for success.

James Palik, senior member of our chapter and documentation specialist at Hewlett-Packard in their European headquarters in Böblingen, Germany, has been working on training movies over the past year or so. He will not only tell us how a Flash movie is produced, but actually produce a full-featured Flash movie on the spot, thereby showing how easy you can bring motion and sound into the sometimes quite deadlooking world of technical documentation.

Dinner
A very good restaurant in the outskirts of Munich near a forest.

Friends, food and lots of fun - the traditional STC-TAC dinners are not to be missed. The venue will be announced at the meeting. The dinner is pre-paid at the registration desk, so that we will not have to ask for a split bill at the restaurant. If you are bringing a guest along (who is not taking part in the conference), you should indicate this on your registration form, as we need to reserve a large enough room. Please indicate any dietary requirements on the registration form.

Marketing Your Skills
A very good speaker I would recommend to present for us. She'll help you make your positioning statement to win accounts and influence people.

Susan Schaefer, is an expert in PR and was president of the PRSA (the "STC" for PR people) in Minnesota. She will tell us about the kind of communication that we need to do, but usually don't do very well: communicating our skills and value to potential customers, or to the management of our employer (who should really give us all a raise). How do you bring a message that involves some political or monetary issues? Susan has worked for many companies that had such politically charged communications to do, such as waste removal industries preparing a new landfill site, architectural firms telling people why their neighborhood will be forever changed, etc. No doubt her insights in communication will help us further our own careers.

Efficient Creation of Individualized Operating Manuals
Highly-flexible manufacturing has bred the need for manuals adapted to the configuration of every item produced. In this case, manuals for under-water pumps in 11 languages. A very good presentation for documentation in a flexible manufacturing environment.

Michael Müller-Hillebrand works in the field of pre-press and documentation since 1988. He acquired detailed knowledge of WebWorks Publisher and FrameScript. Over the last years his focus expanded to include XML/XSL-based publishing. Michael's presentation shows how a medium-sized supplier of pumps and machinery equipment implemented a solution to create individualized operating manuals for every shipping product. Printing happens just-in-time if a machine is ready for shipment. The solution uses a browser-based front-end and FrameMaker documents as the sources for the individually configured and updated manuals.

Using Simplified English in Practice
This presentation was similar to our recent conference about simplified English.

Frans Wijma works for Tedopres, a Netherlands-based multinational company that originally did translation but has expanded their work area to include various kinds of support for technical writing and localization. One of the tools developed at Tedopres is HyperSE, a simplified English checker that works with the user-defined terminology database HyperTerm. Frans Wijma will show us how simplified English really works in practice, and what advantages we can expect in real life.

Panel: Marketing Your Profession
Jang asked if I would be a member of the panel, so I accepted! This was a difficult subject, as we have no advertising power, so it's about branding and positioning. Showing your advantages over brand ‘B' so to speak. Keep your boss, internal, and external customers happy.

While the global economy seems to take a turn for the better, this does not automatically lead to new jobs and benefits. Cost reduction is still on the agenda of most development and production companies, in all fields. We need to show where our added value lies, and the experts we have available at this 12th STC-TAC conference can probably answer most of our questions about how to achieve that goal.

Champagne Reception and Chocolate Raffle
I WON, I WON!!! Chocolate that is. With only 5 Euros of tickets. The raffle brought in like 185 Euros - not bad for donated chocolate.

No STC-TAC conference would be complete without a champagne reception and a chocolate raffle. These have always been, and will probably always be, the events that mark the end of yet another successful STC-TransAlpine conference.

This wrapped-up the Munich conference.

2004-11-19 - Online Documentation - What Employers Want

Date & Time: 19 November 2004 - 1pm-5pm
Location: Jussieu University, Paris
Speakers:
Margery Watson (INTECOM): Online documentation for technical communication
Lucy Veisblat (eCreation): What employers want

Introduction and Announcements

Kevin Journeaux, STC France Chapter President, opened the meeting and after briefly introducing the board members present - Stuart Culshaw (Vice President and Webmaster) and Ellen Lebelle (Secretary) -- then presented the STC to the D.E.S.S. students and non-members present. This meeting was run in conjunction with Lucy Veisblat's class in the D.E.S.S. program in technical communication at Jussieu. Discussion about who we (STC) are, why we encourage membership in the STC, etc.

Kevin spoke briefly about the new membership categories.

The STC, as a whole, and the France chapter, in particular, need more active members - people willing to volunteer some time. Kevin copied the call for volunteers from Vicky Koster-Lenhardt, our regional director sponsor.

The STC France website is up and running and in order to make ours a real community, we need you to contribute to the website.

As always, we are looking for meeting rooms - perhaps your company can lend us a large meeting room.

Margery Watson: Online documentation for technical communication.

It was an excellent presentation of the online documentation process that generated considerable discussion. A good deal of the work is done up front, before you even sign the contract, so how do you get paid for it. (She always comes away with the contract, so it's not a problem !)

Break

An excellent time to network, especially with the students who were happy to see a mixed group of professionals. Members introduce themselves

Job Titles for Technical Communicators
We continued introducing ourselves, the companies we work for and our job titles. This led to a lively discussion about the titles - in English, in French, what they mean, how they are inadequate. Richard Ryan, an STC member and professor from the program at the university in Clermont (http://www.vichy-universite.com/documentation/normalisee.asp), has been dealing with the issue. Remember that in France, the labels and job titles and duties are registered with the employment authority. Lucy sent us this link for professional job titles: http://www.adbs.fr/site/management/metiers/.

Competition

Jennifer was able to get in a few words about the competition. Although registration is closed for this year, the current students can compete in next year's competition. She brought judges evaluations with her - all of which disappeared immediately.

Lucy Veisblat: What employers want

Lucy presented what employers require in the way of technical communicators. For the students, the presentation (available on the website) provided a checklist that they could verify by speaking to those present, who work for agencies, are salaried, or are freelancers.

Odds and ends

Before everyone left the room, Kevin handed out a satisfaction questionnaire. Most people handed it back in and as soon as the board compiles the data, it will be posted on the website.

Jennifer presented the petition to nominate Paula Berger as 2nd vice-president of the STC. The 2nd v-p becomes the 1st v-p the next year and then the president in the third year of service. This is not a vote for Paula Berger, merely the petition to attain the 400 signatures that allow her candidacy. Jennifer pointed out that Paula is a former member of the Italy chapter and, if elected, will bring her foreign experience to the STC board.

Margery, our guest speaker, took this occasion to announce that the STC was dropping out of INTECOM, the international group of technical communicator organizations. http://www.intecom.org/dynindex.html This decision came as a surprise to most of the members present. This would be a good subject of discussion in a forum on the website ! Lunch
The secretary could not stay for lunch, but it looked like a good crowd. Several students joined the members in the downstairs room of the Epsilon Brasserie.

2005-03-19 - STC France Community Website - Product Simulation

Event report by Ellen Lebelle, Secretary, STC France Chapter

Date and Time: March 19, 2005, 9:30am. - 4:30pm.
Location: Salle Patio 3 (located between towers 24 and 34) - Université de Jussieu (Paris VII) - Paris 5ème arrondissement, Metro Jussieu (line 7)
Speakers:
Stuart Culshaw (VP, STC France Chapter): Automating Web-based Communities - The Technology Behind the STC France Website
Jens Ehrke (Ehrke & Partner): Web-based Product Simulation for Marketing, Feature Awareness and Education: Meeting Modern Customer Support Needs for Consumer Electronics.

Attendees: too few, in everyone’s opinion.

Agenda:

9:30 – Registration and introductions, chapter news
Everyone introduced him or herself quickly and the meeting got underway on time.

10:00 – Automating Web-based Communities: The Technology Behind the STC France Website, by Stuart Culshaw, freelance documentation and website developer

Stuart gave a very complete presentation of exactly what is meant by Open-source software, to begin with. What does “free” mean? (It’s the “free speech” meaning, not the “free beer” for anyone still wondering.) What is a copyleft? (An obligation to maintain free use, as opposed to a copyright, which restricts any use of material). How does the open source world operate in terms of maintenance, support and improvements, for example? (Through blogs, e-mail and community. There is more elaborate support for open-source software that is purchased, though.)

Then he went into the comparative investigation for finding the software behind our STC France website. He not only shared the comparison of available software, but he also gave us checklist for aiding our own search. What is right for us may not exactly fill the needs for every project. He settled on Mambo and the vast supply of modules that provide advanced features such as events management and registration, latest news, discussion groups, newsletters, document management, and more. This means that he can try a module, and if it doesn’t fit the bill, he can replace it with another. The blogs and other users’ messages also help guide the selection. (An aside, post-meeting: our sister company decided to put an ad on the site for a technical writer. We had some difficulty in the Word-to-Mambo copy and paste sequence. We submitted the ad and alerted Stu to the problem. He immediately replaced the html editor module.)

We took a look at the site – front-end. Of course, most of us are now familiar with the site, but this allowed us to see the differentiation between users. We do not share equal access to the site. Guests have the least access – view only and not everything. Registered members get greater access, including the new job bank. Board members have even more with author rights. We can do polls – there is now a poll about when to hold meetings, so we can have more attendees. We have a chat function for when 2 or more of us are visiting the site at the same time. This got us impatient to how he put it together.

We took a look at the back-end. And here we could see the architecture of the site and how the modules fit in and were given the STC France finish.

This presentation took a bit longer than expected because it was interesting and prompted constant questions for more detail.
Lunch – Not at the Arbre a Cannelle – we ended up across the street and had a very good lunch, little less than the announced 20€.

Not at the Arbre a Cannelle – we ended up across the street and had a very good lunch, little less than the announced 20€.
2:30 P.M. – Web-based Product Simulation for Marketing, Feature Awareness and Education: Meeting Modern Customer Support Needs for Consumer Electronics, by Jens Ehrke of Ehrke & Partner

Best of Show and Award for Excellence in Technical Communications in Amsterdam at the Trans-European Technical Communications Awards for work on the Olympus' flagship E-1 camera tutorial. Go to http://www.ehrke-partner.com/ and click on the Olympus E-1 link.

Jens described the process of his help – trying to fit the cerebral user, who needs to understand before he touches the device (the reader), and the hands-on user, who doesn’t usually bother with reading and starts playing with the device and might miss out on a lot of extra features. The only way for you to see this is to go to the site and start – if you are reading, you need to go to the camera and click you way through the procedure. If you are playing with the camera, the relevant text pops up to suit what you are doing. All along, there are tooltips, prompts and questions to guide you back and forth between the text and the device. Jens does this type of tutorial for telephones and other electronic devices, too.

We then took a look at the back-end. The whole tutorial is a javascript application. There is an extensive graphics repository to handle all the action of the camera. But once the application is written for one device of a type, single-sourcing methods make it easily adaptable for the next device of the same type.

This also took a bit longer than expected – due to great interest and questions.

4:15 P.M. – STC Transformation: What’s in it for us? by Ellen Lebelle

An effort to understand the implications on exactly what we are voting on (Referendum to change the by-laws) and how the rest of the transformation will affect us, here, in France.

It was basically a summary of the http://www.stc.org/transformation/ site. A wake-up call, as it were, and it did lead to a number of questions about what this transformation is. As we are in the election period now, please visit the site.

The major outcome of the short discussion is that perhaps the France chapter needs to re-define its charter. We hope the next meeting will be able to devote more time to this issue.

5:15 P.M. End of Meeting

2005-05-26 - General Assembly

Date & Time: May 26 2005, 7pm
Location: Restaurant Thoumieux, Paris 7e
Speakers:
Stuart Culshaw, VP France Chapter
Vici Koster-Lenhardt, STC Region 2 Director Sponsor

12 members and 2 non-members attended our AGM evening dinner event on Thursday May 26 at the Thoumieux restaurant in Paris. In addition to electing the new members of the STC France Board, enjoying some good food and wine and networking with colleagues, the meeting aimed to encourage those present to get involved in thinking about the future of our chapter. Nearly everyone present took up the challenge and completed the volunteer questionnaire form, offering their skills and a bit of time to assist in the creation and running of our projects and working committees over the coming year.

New board members were elected at the meeting. In addition to the members present there were 15 electronic votes. Thanks to everyone who participated. The STC France Chapter board for 2005-6 is as follows:

President: Stuart Culshaw
Vice President: Jennifer O Neill
Secretary: Ellen Lebelle
Treasurer: No one ran for Treasurer, so Ellen will be doubling up as treasurer until we're able to find a willing volunteer. If you're interested in this role, please contact a member of the board!
We had one France chapter member come in from afar for this meeting: Ami Wright, from Boston, who organized her trip to France around the date of the meeting. It was great to meet her and she was able to renew contact with the chapter.Other attendees included both recent and returning members, and Marie-Louise Flacke, member of the Conseil des Rédacteurs Techniques and vice-president of INTECOM.

Vici Koster-Lenhardt, our STC Regional Director-Sponsor, was our special guest at the meeting and she provided us with some interesting feedback from the recent STC conference in Seattle on the changes and innovations going on within the STC worldwide.

Vici was in Paris to lead the newly-elected and out-going members of the STC France Board through two days of intensive strategic planning. These strategic meetings took place all day Friday and Saturday following the dinner event and provided the opportunity for the Board to develop ideas and strategies for building a more effective chapter.

Many chapters are facing the same challenges as the STC France Chapter - finding volunteers, having well-attended and effective meetings and ensuring leadership continuity and membership growth. It's always good to know that you are not alone and that, because others are dealing with the same problems, some solutions are out there!

With Vici's help, we worked through the STC Rechartering Exercise, designed to focus in on ways to improve the value that our chapter provides to members and to the community at large and at the end of the two days we had established a number of policies and objectives for the coming year and beyond, as well as a provisional calendar of events and an ambitious list of To-Do's. More information to follow!

2005-09-29 - Wikis

Date & Time: 29 sept. 2005 8.30pm
Location: FIAP Jean Monnet, Paris
Speaker: Stuart Culshaw (President, France Chapter)
Topic: wikis
Cost: Free for members, €20 non members

Meeting Minutes
We held our first regular chapter meeting of the year at the FIAP Jean Monnet in Paris' 14th arrondissement - our self-appointed new home!

The subject of this meeting was Wikis. Chapter president Stuart Culshaw replaced scheduled speaker Chris McCarthy, who wasn't able to make it due to illness. Stuart gave us an excellent introduction to Wikis.

Attendance:
Over the past couple of years, the board has experimented with different schedules in order to attract more members to meetings. This Thursday evening meeting brought out five (of the seven who signed up) members and two non-members, which is about average. The meeting was free for members and the board is confident that mid-week evening meetings, that do not interfere with work schedules or budgets, will be a promising formula.

Venue:
This was the first chapter meeting at the FIAP Jean Monnet, 30 rue Cabanis, 75014. The board and volunteers have already had meetings there and we hope that, as members get used to the address and frequent attendance there, we will be able to call this our “home”. A few of us met in the bar area between 7 and 7:30 and then had an inexpensive meal in the self-serve restaurant at the center before going upstairs to the meeting room. Those who came by car had no problem finding a legal space (free after 7:00 P.M.) and access is easy from the RER or M° Denfert Rochereau or M° Glacière.

Agenda:
Before the presentation, Stuart Culshaw, chapter president, brought us up to date: the chapter has officially changed address: chez Culshaw, 5 rue des Cinq Diamants, 75013 PARIS. It has been published in the Journal Officiel. This was the first change of address since the chapter was founded over 10 years ago, when it was established at Patricia McClelland's address, and remained there long after she moved.

The second item was the announcement that JoAnn Hackos will be in Paris in November and we are scheduling an evening meeting for November 7, 2005 on the subject of DITA. The exact domain will be announced soon. But we have reserved the room and expect a larger turnout.

We have also reserved Friday, March 24, 2006 for an all-day conference. We already have a number of top class speakers lined up, including a representative from IDC Translations, a regular presenter at the annual STC conferences in the States. Several presentations, round-table discussions and a panel discussion will be scheduled throughout the day. More details will be made available shortly.

Christopher McCarthy, technical writer at GL Trade, S.A., was to speak on the subject of Wikis. Unfortunately, Chris was ill. Chapter president Stuart Culshaw, who has recently joined ILOG (where it seems wikis are a way of life), was able to put together an excellent presentation at the last minute. At a meeting earlier in the year, when he presented the new STC France website and the technology behind it, he briefly mentioned wikis, so the subject is not new to him.

Presentation:
Stuart started with a brief introduction to Wikis. Wiki (short for wikiwiki, which means “quick” in Hawaiian) came into being just ten years ago, in 1995, by Cunningham & Cunningham, as part of the Portland Pattern Repository web site. It allows users to edit and/or comment all the pages without going through a webmaster or other centralized controls. It's also a state of mind – in order to work, you have to be the kind of person who shares information (As technical communicators, we probably are); in a company that wants people to be well-informed and free to find information ... You get the idea.

Stuart went on to list a number of informative sites and explained the rudiments of Wiki formatting. Wikis are still considered new and come in many flavors, so there is not (yet) a standard.

Stuart demonstrated how to write Wiki style with the few formatting rules he showed. You basically just write in plain text, pressing enter twice to separate paragraphs with a blank line. You can create simple text formatting by putting two or more equal signs (=) on both sides of a word or expression, for example.

Lastly, he presented some companies that are using Wikis or Twikis (a corporate-friendly variant) in the workplace with comments from the users – including some of the challenges faced when attempting to implement their wiki environment.

The meeting ended around 10:30pm

 

2005-11-07 - DITA with JoAnn Hackos

Date: Monday, Nov 7, 2005.
Time: Dinner 7pm - 8.30pm / Presentation 8.45pm - 10.30pm
Location: FIAP Jean Monnet, 30, rue Cabanis, Paris 14 (http://www.fiap.asso.fr/)
Guest speakers: Dr. JoAnn Hackos (Comtech Services/CIDM), Jerry Silver (Blast Radius)
Topic: DITA: Moving From Books to Topics
Cost: €20 STC members/students, €35 non members, Dinner (optional): €24 per person
Format: Presentation "DITA: Moving From Books to Topics" by Dr JoAnn Hackos + Presentation "Challenges and solutions for authoring in DITA" and product demonstration of XMetaL Author DITA Edition by Jerry Silver.

Attendance:
16 members and 16 non-members. There were just over 40 who signed up, so attendance was about 75% of the expected draw. 17 attendees joined our two speakers for dinner before the meeting at the on-site restaurant. The FIAP again proved to be a good location: easy parking; not far from the metro; a bar for a drink if you get there early; and meeting rooms of varying sizes.

Minutes:
Announcement of upcoming meetings:
STC European Competition Awards meeting and dinner on Saturday, January 21, 2006 in London.
STC France Chapter one-day conference on Friday, March 24, 2006.
Call for volunteers:
The STC France Chapter conference will need volunteers, just as the chapter generally needs volunteers. We are looking for people with experience handling events or who want to get that experience.

Call for candidates:
The March 24 meeting will also be the general assembly and election. Please consider joining the board.

About the Speakers:
Stuart Culshaw, STC France Chapter president, introduced our two speakers for the evening:

Dr. JoAnn Hackos is President of Comtech Services and Director of the Center for Information-Development Management. She is a Fellow and Former President of STC and is a founder with IBM of the OASIS Technical Committee for the DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) standard.

Jerry Silver has over 20 years of IT experience, specializing in content management, collaboration, database and application modeling and design, application architectures, XML, and Web technologies. He spent 15 years at Oracle in a variety of technical roles, most recently as Principal Product Manager of Oracle Application Server Portal and also served as Director of Product Strategy with content management vendor NCompass Labs, now part of Microsoft, before joining Blast Radius.

STC France Chapter President Stuart Culshaw presents JoAnn Hackos with The Good Bird Guide as a thank-you gift.

Presentations:
DITA : Moving from Books to Topics
JoAnn explained that DITA is the "embodiment of best practices" towards which technical communicators have been working for years.

Desktop publishing and SGML-based applications led us to continue creating books with structure based on the visual formatting. HTML continued to reinforce the emphasis on formatting structure, although the move towards topics was underway. Books do not correspond to users’ need to get specific information quickly, while topics can be taken individually or assembled to suit the user’s immediate need. This topic-based architecture isn't appropriate for all types of books, but is particularly suited to user manuals and reference guides. Regardless of the tools you use, this topic-based architecture offers many advantages.

DITA Topics are meaningful, stand-alone units of information. There are three basic types of information in the DITA design: concept, task and reference. Through use of attributes you can get what other systems call variables and conditional text and you can use filters to allow overlapping attributes. You can generate output documents that only include appropriate information, based on multiple attribute criteria - for example, only including content appropriate for HTML or PDF output, or only content relating to a specific product version or user profile.

DITA is not a tool - it’s an information design architecture.

JoAnn illustrated her presentation with examples of DITA-compliant documentation and online help for AutoCad. The DITA-based documentation has been met with great enthusiasm by AutoCad users.

XMetaL Author DITA Edition
Jerry Silver, Director of Product Management at BLAST RADIUS, took advantage of JoAnn’s introduction to DITA, to go straight into a brief demonstration of XMetaL Author DITA Edition, a full-featured authoring tool that natively supports the DITA specification. That means that you do not have to go through hard-coding XML tags in Wordpad. You can create or edit topics by pulling in previously created chunks or creating new ones and you can see how your document is structured. In fact, you are guided by the structure instructions if you are creating a new topic. You can preview the output easily in HTML or PDF so you can see what it looks like, if you need to.

Given the limited time available, Jerry was only able to demonstrate a few of XMetaL Author for DITA's features, but thankfully he had brought along enough demo version CDs for everyone (which he exchanged for bueiness cards) and also announced that Blast Radius would be giving a Webinar on December 1 2005 with more information about the product, and in particular issues facing users with existing FrameMaker documentation. The webinar will be at 7:00 p.m. Paris time (10am Vancouver time) on December 1st. At the time of writing, the webinar is not yet posted on the Blast Radius site, but you can check the following page for signup information, coming soon: http://www.xmetal.com/en_us/news/online_events/index.x

The meeting ended around 10.45pm, following a short question and answer session.

2006-01-21 - STC Trans-European Tech Comms Competition Awards Event

Report by Ellen Lebelle

Several members of the STC France Chapter board traveled to London for the Competition Awards event on Saturday 21 January 2006 - A great mix of networking opportunties, presentations, leadership discussions and fun!

Hosted by the STC UK Chapter, the event was attended by over 30 guests - including judges, winners and organizers of the competition, members from several European chapters, and three current STC Board members. The event was a great success and provided a great mix of networking opportunties, presentations, leadership discussions and fun - including a champagne flight on the London Eye and awards dinner at a Covent Garden restaurant. New: See the video!

The weekend started early for Stuart (STC France Chapter President) and myself, as we traveled together on the 7.43am Eurostar to London on the Saturday morning - a chance to discuss preparations for the upcoming STC France Chapter Annual Conference: Taking Charge of Your Career event we are planning for Friday March 24, 2006 in Paris. Jennifer O Neill, STC TETCC Competition Manager (and VP of the France Chapter), had arrived in London from Brussels the night before and was able to set up the competition exhibit table early so that we had plenty of time to look over this year's competition entries.

The winning entries were especially interesting to examine. We can always learn something by looking at good work, especially when that work is accompanied by the judges’ forms that identify what was done right and what, in certain cases, could be improved. The competition is proving increasingly popular with companies each year and is an excellent (and very cost-effective!) way to receive professional and in-depth feedback about the quality of their technical documentation. Comments and criticisms from the 3-judge panels that examine each entry are always constructive and the whole competition offers a great learning experience for everyone involved. I have only missed one awards event since becoming a member of STC and am looking forward to participating again in next year's competition.

David Farbey, STC UK Chapter President, welcomed all attendees and pointed out the exceptional presence of so many STC board members: Paula Berger (VP and Incoming President), Mark Clifford (Assistant to the STC President on Global Interests), and Vici Koster-Lenhardt, Director of Region 2.

Ellis Pratt, Sales and Marketing Director of Cherryleaf, a UK-based technical communication recruitment company, kicked off the day's presentations with an interactive discussion entitled “The Marketing and Positioning of Technical Authors”. Ellis discussed techniques that technical communictors can use to identify their own niche markets when marketing themselves either to clients or to people within their own company. The talk included tips and exercises to help anyone – agency, freelancer or employee – recognize the people we deal with and who we often have to “sell” our work and services to on a regular basis.

Mark Clifford, who, in addition to his STC responsabilities, also runs an information design and new media recruitment agency, Clifford Sells Ltd, then went on to present a report on the growing interest the STC is taking in the international aspects of our profession. Mark is running for 2nd Vice-President in the upcoming STC election and will be our keynote speaker at the STC France Chapter Annual Conference in March.

Alice Jane Emanuel, from Comma Theory, gave us a thorough (albeit speedy!) presentation on "Quality in Technical Communication". Of course, in a technical communication competition, quality is essential. It's what the judges are looking for. Alice Jane pointed out, however, that quality can mean different things to different people. Quality for the user might mean that information can be easily found, understood and useful (such as an illustration that clearly indicates what to do in case of an emergency). For a manufacturer or service provider, quality might mean timely delivery and reduced support costs. For documentation managers and producers, quality also means technical accuracy and the ease with which a document can be translated to meet the needs of the company's target markets, and more.

Satisfying all these requirements for quality is a balancing act that requires many varied skills and a broad range of knowledge on behalf of the technical communicator. Acquiring and maintaining these skills requires specialist education and regular training and is the theme of the STC France Chapter Annual Conference: Taking Charge of Your Career event that we will be holding in Paris in March.

After lunch, the STC chapter leaders and other interested members met to decide whether to go ahead with the organization of a Regional Conference in London in October 2006. The decision was taken to pursue the project and those present discussed possible themes and agreed to set up a discussion group to help move things forward.

Mark your calendars and prepare a travel budget and join is in London on October 13-14, 2006. The two-day event will be the first ever STC regional conference to be held in Europe, involving all chapters from STC's Region 2 and is being planned to coincide with the STC Board meeting which will take place in London that week.

Paula Berger, STC Vice-President, who will be "sworn in" as STC President in May at the STC Annual Conference in Las Vegas, then went on to give a dynamic presentation of the changes that have occurred within STC, and those that are to come, as the STC energizes and refocuses on the profession. The key to the success of our organization in the future will be in looking outward, beyond the STC and certainly beyond the US borders.

We then heard from the BEST OF SHOW winners, The Human Interface Group, in Belgium. Beatrijs Vermaere showed us how a well-implemented usability and documentation process led to their exceptional guides. We would have liked to have had more chance to ask questions of the winning entrants, especially with regards to the process they were able to implement (as a salaried employee in a small company, it seems like such a hard sell to me!) We plan to ask Beatrijs or a representative from The Human Interface Group to speak at a future STC France Chapter meeting where we hope they'll let us in on some of the secrets of their success!

Alice Jane and Jennifer also gave a thorough presentation of the Trans-European Technical Communication competition, including what it means to the entrants (recognition for quality, peer review and constructive criticism, exchange of ideas, and more), how to enter and how to judge.

A panel of other winners from this year's competition then briefly presented their entries and we were able to ask them some questions. John Pascoe, one of the authors of "Stadium Engineering" (winner of the Book award), pointed out how valuable the judges’ evaluations were. As always, you come away having learned a lot.

After all the talk and enthusiastic discussions, it was time to head off for a "champagne flight" on the London Eye and dinner at an Indian restaurant close to Covent garden for the awards dinner, where winners were presented with their certificates and we all enjoyed some more relaxed and informal discussions - and some great food and wine!

After a good night's sleep, Stuart, Jennifer and myself were able to meet up for breakfast on Sunday morning with Vici Koster-Lenhardt and Tina Hoffman, STC UK Secretary, for more leadership discussions and ideas on how we can continue improving the value that STC offers to members. As members ourselves, we all agreed that attending the STC TETCC awards event was an invaluable learning and networking experience. We hope you'll consider getting involved in next year's competition and join us at next year's awards event!

The results of this year's competition and information about next year's competition will be posted shortly on the STC Europe website: http://www.stc-europe.org/.

2006-03-24 - France Chapter Annual Conference Report

The STC France Chapter Annual Conference 2006 on March 24, 2006 in Paris was a great success! We had over 40 participants from all over France (and beyond) and our team of expert speakers helped make this one of our most innovative and dynamic France Chapter conferences to date!

The theme of this year's conference was Taking Charge of Your Career and our goal was to provide attendees with an opportunity to learn more about current trends and techniques in the profession, learn about how others had negotiated the various twists and turns of their careers and discover new ways to take better charge of their own professional development.

"Met my expectations at a good price"

The conference included morning and afternoon keynote presentations, several parallel round table breakout sessions, a networking lunch and a panel discussion on the theme of training and professional development for technical communicators. The conference was followed by the STC France Chapter Annual General Meeting from 5pm-6pm.

"Very informative"

We began the day with coffee and croissants at 9am - a chance for attendees to pick up their conference packs, catch up with some old friends or colleagues and engage in a bit of informal networking before things got under way. Among the attendees we had several students from the Masters program in Multilingual and Multimedia Documentation Design at Paris 7 University (Jussieu) and from the Master Métiers de la traduction et de la communication multilingue et multimédia at the University of Rennes 2.

"The conference was very motivating – it gave me an idea how my career can evolve"

We had people travel up from Lyon and Aix-en-Provence, and even from as far away as Switzerland, Belgium and the UK. Several of our speakers also traveled in from abroad, including our afternoon keynote speaker Jeannette Eichholz who flew in from Milwaukee in the US especially for the event. It was good to see such so many new faces in the crowd, and with a total of 35 attendees and 8 speakers, this was one of our most well attended chapter meetings ever.
After a short welcome from France Chapter President Stuart Culshaw, our morning keynote speaker got us underway with a look at current trends in the technical communication market. Mark Clifford, former President and now Membership Manager of the STC UK chapter, as well as Assistant to the President for Global Interests and a candidate in this year's STC elections for the position of Second Vice President, got us thinking about the changes going on in the global economy and the impact that those changes are having on our profession. He emphasized the importance of continually developing our skills to stay abreast of ongoing trends and new techniques and not allowing ourselves to fall behind.

Mark went on to remind us all of the importance of keeping our personal portfolio and resumé up to date with samples of our recent work and concrete examples of how, as a technical communicator, we were able to contribute to the overall business goals of our employer or customer. Mark argued that unless we are able to prove our worth to management, we run the risk of having our jobs seen as just yet another unavoidable expense, and thus an easy target for outsourcing. A lot of work needs to be done to promote our profession to corporate management and to show how the unique skillset of technical communicators can provide considerable value in many areas, not just our traditional role of producing product documentation.

One of the questions raised at the end of Mark's presentation revolved around the need for technical communicators to have knowledge of many different related fields. We don't necessarily have to master all these skills, but we should know enough about them to be able to interact with and benefit from the more specialist knowledge and skills of experts. While there does appear to be a continuing need for the kind of "Jack of all trades" role that, as technical communicators, we are used to playing almost every day, we should also consider delving deeper into one or more of these related fields, such as usability, information architectecture or quality assurance.

At around 10.15am we split into four separate groups for the parallel round-table breakout sessions. Each 45-minute session took place in a separate small meeting room, with 10-15 persons max. per group and each session repeated once, thus enabling attendees to choose 2 out of the 4 topics on offer. This session format proved to be a great success with all participants. Our round table host speakers were invited to start with a short, relatively informal presentation, and the smaller group sizes helped encourage interactive discussion among all participants. We'll definitely try to repeat this format at future events, though probably with slightly longer sessions to avoid having to break up conversations and force people to move on to the next session!

Elisabeth Sabot, a graduate of the Rennes translation program and currently technical writer and translator at Influe-Illicom, recounted her transition from translation to technical communication. All participants had chance to recount their own stories. Several other participants, it seemed, had also moved into the field of technical communication from translation. As technical communicators in a non-English speaking country, most of us found ourselves as both translators and technical writers. It was also fascinating to find out how others came to move into the profession from many different directions.

Jeannette Eichholz described how her department at G.E. Medical transformed its documentation from disparate documents to single-sourced documents that are managed in a Content Management System on a single server for all the writers working in the division around the world. The first step was moving to FrameMaker, then to Structured FrameMaker, which enforces the style guide and template, followed by the move to XML files in a database. Many other companies are going down the same track (or planning to in the future) and so it was very valuable to hear about this particularly successful project.

Chris Durban, independent financial translator and author, and current president of the Société Française des Traducteurs (SFT), presented the different aspects of translating and writing in the financial sector, with many varied examples and plenty of good advice for anyone looking to move into this area of the profession where, it seems, skilled writers and translators are still very much in demand.

Marc Swanson shared his experience of moving from technical writer to marketing writer. Life on the flipside of the client signature, as he described it. Marketing and business communication is done before a client signs on the dotted line and purchases a product, so the writing must appeal to an audience of prospective buyers, whereas technical writers are generally writing for users of a product that their company has already purchased for them, and therefore don't have much alternative but to ready the documentation if they need assistance. Marc's presentation provided an interesting way of looking at writing: The different audiences, the different deliverables, and the different styles.

Lunch was served at the onsite restaurant and provided an excellent opportunity for participants to compare stories from the morning sessions and engage in some informal networking while enjoying a nice three-course meal.

When there was no more wine or coffee to be had, we were able to convince people to return to the meeting room. Our afternoon session began with a keynote presentation on preparing documents for translation by Jeannette Eichholz on behalf of the Milwaukee-based translation agency ICD, who kindly sponsored Jeannette's attendance at the conference. For the writers in the audience, it provided a valuable insight into the problems and expenses that can arise during the translation process due to poorly written documents. In addition to advice on maintaining good writing standards, there was also practical advice on how to deliver files to translators, and on the importance of providing supporting documents such as multilingual glossaries and interface guidelines, so as to make the process as straightforward as possible for the translator.

After a short break, we moved onto our panel discussion, which was moderated by STC Region 2 Director/Sponsor Vici Koster-Lenhardt. Our three panelists were each invited to make a short, relatively informal presentation of about 15 minutes on a specific issue relating to the education, training and professional development of technical communicators. This then served as a springboard for questions and discussion between the audience and the panelists.

David Farbey, STC UK Chapter President, spoke about distance learning and e-learning and how both these techniques are used for technical communication courses in the UK. David defined "distance learning" as referring to courses that provide access to a tutor and allow interaction with other students via email, discussion forums and live chat (somewhat like an "extended classroom"), whereas "e-learning" typically refers to individual study modules that are usually shorter and related to a specific topic. Successful courses, it seems, are those that can provide a combination of these two methods of learning to suit the varying needs of students. David pointed out that there are no longer any traditional classroom-based undergraduate courses in Technical Communication in the UK, though graduate-level courses are still going strong.

Sheffield-Hallam University, where David teaches, provides a hybrid e-learning/distance learning course, which allows students to work from anywhere at a time that suits them and yet still follow a complete 2-year course of study. The university is also looking at ways to make individual components of the course available as separate modules. This would be particularly of interest to working technical communicators just wishing to brush up their skills or learn new skills in a particular area. David recommended anyone considering distance learning or e-learning training to look around and compare the many different courses on offer, whether from private vendors or from traditional universities and colleges.

Daniel Gouadec, Director of the Centre de Formation de Traducteurs, Terminologues et Rédacteurs (CFTTR) at the Université de Rennes 2, presented a comparison of the skills that technical communicators and translators are (or should be) taught and argued that both groups actually have very similar skill sets and training requirements. The key to success in today's very competitive translation market is no longer just one's ability to translate well, but rather all the additional skills that translators must be able to master, such as the ability to write well, set up and run a website, write a proposal, or create multilingual terminology databases. Daniel expressed concern at the large number of translators who continue to arrive on the market each year without sufficient training.

Chris Durban, as current President of the Société Française des Traducteurs (SFT), member of several other professional societies for translators and founder of a French association that works to promote better understanding of the translating profession to corporate management within the financial sector, was the perfect person to address the issue of cross-professional networking and how important it can be to career develpment. Chris gave an energetic talk on the importance of belonging to one or more professional societies and in particular that the relatively low-cost of membership of such societies (in comparison to the fees charged within many of the regulated professions (such as those for doctors or lawyers, for example), pay for themselves many times over in terms of networking, learning and job-hunting opportunities.

Chris also called for more work to be done by professional societies such as the SFT or STC to both promote their respective professions to a wider audience (and in particular top management), but also to understand better the people working in the profession. It is surprisingly difficult, for example, to come up with a reliable estimate of the number of translators working in France. The same is certainly true about the technical communication market here too. Chris ended with an invitation for STC and the SFT to develop closer ties in the future and to explore ways to organize joint events or exchange speakers on topics which are clearly of relevance to both translators and technical writers.

The discussions that followed the panel presentations clearly showed that participants were eager for more training and learning opportunities and that there is also a certain degree of apprehension about the future of the profession. Most agreed that lifelong learning and membership of professional societies were two important ways in which we could all help ourselves to take charge of our careers.

After another short break, we held our traditional prize raffle, which gave all participants the chance to win some cool STC-branded goodies in return for handing in their completed event feedback form. We also added a special raffle for the students who were present and awarded a free STC student membership to the lucky winner, Etienne Beuter, from the CDMM course at Jussieu University.

We thanked our speakers with a small gift of chocolate, and a special thanks went to Vici Koster-Lenhardt who has been a great help and inspiration to our chapter leadership team, since she hosted our first strategic planning meeting last May. As STC Region 2 Director-Sponsor, Vici has had a huge positive impact not only our chapter, but all the chapters in this region, which covers all the STC Chapters in Europe and Israel as well as several on the West coast of the US. Vici's term as Regional Director Sponsor comes to an end in May, but she will continue to encourage STC's development as an international organization in the future as she moves up to a position on the STC's nominating committee. Vici began her tenure as Region 2 Director Sponsor three years ago with a visit to the STC France Chapter and it was perhaps fitting that her last "official engagement" before the STC Annual Conference in Las Vegas in May should also be here with us at a France Chapter event. We still hope to be able to persuade Vici to come and visit us again soon in Paris, which, given her love of macaroons from La Durée, shouldn't be so difficult ;-)

We closed the day with a round-up of France Chapter activities over the last year, a brief financial report from Chapter Treasurer Ellen Lebelle who, amongst other things, explained our decision last year to purchase our own video-projector to avoid having to beg, borrow or (worse) rent one for around €300 a time for our chapter meetings.

Janet Richards then went on to present the results of the STC France Chapter 2006 Salary Survey, which took place in February and was addressed to full-time salaried technical communicators working in France. We received 59 completed surveys from all over France, our best response rate ever.

Since the last survey in 2003, salaries for technical communicators in France seem to have remained more or less stable, rising just over 2%, compared to an inflation rate of around 4% in France over the same period. On the bright side, entry-level salaries do seem to be on the rise. Complete results for the STC France Chapter 2006 Salary Survey are available for download from the STC France Chapter website.

Chapter president Stuart Culshaw then gave a brief run-down of our plans for the future. In particular, next year, we would like to:

Continue our policy of low-cost evening meetings throughout the year with one or two invited speakers. We already have one meeting planned for Thursday June 15 on the subject of Usability. So mark your calendars!

Hold at least one chapter or local interest group meeting outside of the Paris area. We have already spoken with several people who are interested in organizing meetings in Lyon and Toulouse. If you'd like to get involved, get in touch with a member of the France Chapter board and find out how you can help make this happen.
Engage more members in volunteer activities and improve support for those volunteer activities with regular meetings throughout the year.

Continue to develop a stronger community by promoting more interaction between members and developing closer relations with employers and universities/training companies.
Hold another strategic planning meeting in early June 2006 to clarify our objectives and establish our plans for next year.
We ended the day with a call for action:

Get involved!
We were not able to hold our chapter leadership election at the conference, as originally planned, due to a lack of candidates. We must hold leadership elections before the STC Annual Conference in May to ensure continuity in the leadership of the chapter, so please consider stepping forward to help develop and promote our chapter. We distributed a list of leadership positions to all conference participants and urged all those present to get involved.

Whether or not you attended the conference, please consider contributing a little of your time and experience and get in touch with a member of the existing France Chapter board to find out more about volunteer opportunities. We have worked hard this year to develop sustainable processes to support our activities. This means it's far easier to make a valuable contribution to our chapter without having to make a lengthy time commitment. Even if you're only able to spare 15 minutes here or there, there's still plenty you can do to help! Look oout for more information coming soon to the STC France Chapter website.

2006-05-07 - STC 53rd Annual Conference Report from Paris, Las Vegas

Bienvenue à Paris!
This year's STC conference took place at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas, but there were many clues that we were in another France: scaled replicas of the Eiffel tower and the Arc de Triumph beside each other at the front of the hotel, with the feet of the Eiffel Tower extending into the hotel casino. Inside, there were replica streets of a French town, together with their quaint little boutiques (most of them open 24 hours!) A pain au chocolat was $3 and a glass of vin rouge $9. I may have changed my diet a little while in this Paris, but that didn't stop me having a great time!

New STC structure
My first event of the week was Leadership Day, which started very early on the Sunday morning. However, the jet lag meant that by 8am I had already been awake for a couple of hours. That's the first time I’ve ever had a steak for breakfast at 6am, but my appetite was still in the Euro time zone and in Vegas they'll serve you anything you want 24 hours a day!
At the meeting, we were introduced to the new STC Executive Director, Susan Allen Burton. Susan has a lot of experience leading many NFPs (not profit organisations) and will start her work with STC in August. We also had the new organisational structure of STC explained to us (go to http://www.stc.org/ and look under About STC/Society Info/Strategic Plan). The former Region 2 (to which the France Chapter belongs) and Region 3 are the first of the regional communities to no longer have a Director-Sponsor, a role which had previously provided support and guidance to chapter and community leaders across each region. From now on, when community leaders have questions or need assistance, we can turn to the newly formed STC Leadership Community Resource and they will allocate us a mentor. STC Chapters are also being "re-branded"; we are soon no longer to be known as the France Chapter, but as the "France Community." We'll provide more information about that change in the near future.

Presentations
My focus at the conference was usability, visual communication, quality and standards (many of my company’s products must comply with a wide variety of regulations). I didn’t attend any of the numerous presentations on CMS or DITA as we have a sub-committee at work that is currently looking into these topics and they attended those presentations.

The strength of the STC annual conference is the wide variety of sessions offered in each time slot – there’s something to please almost everyone. Usually the problem is trying to decide which session to attend as so many sound interesting. The STC has done a lot is the past few years in tightening up the content of sessions and there are far fewer soft or fluffy presentations now than there used to be, although I felt they could still have had more presentations for more experienced technical communicators (sessions are categorised as suitable for All, Getting Started, and Advanced.)

To get copies of the presentations, go to the STC site at:
www.stc.org/53rdConf/sessions/session.materials.asp

Technical communication is moving in several directions and one of them is usability. Bogo Vatovec gave an interesting and practical talk on how technical communicators can become usability engineers. As many of my products are hardware, I attended presentations on producing documentation for the general public as well as improving integration of text and pictures. It was wonderful to see how other companies handle the often-encountered conflict between what you want to communicate and what you can afford to communicate. As several of my products sell for less than 100 euros, my documentation budget is often measured in pennies but I must do these manuals in up to 12 languages. I was advised to visit Epson’s web site to look at some of their end-user manuals for ideas!

I’m currently collecting information from customers on our technical documentation so it was interesting to see what others are up to in this area and what recommendations they have (see Cindy Pao's presentation "Using a Customer Response System to Write and Update User Documentation".)

I also attended a couple of presentations on compliance and regulations. I picked up good information on WEEE (one of the latest regulations to hit my sector) as well as learning what’s going on in other sectors that are heavily regulated, such as the pharmaceutical and aeronautical. I've only been back from the conference less than 2 weeks and I’ve already made use of some of the information I learnt at these meetings, which has been great. And then there were the presentations on metrics and quality. The conference keeps you busy!

The highlight of the conference for me was the post-conference workshop, “Away with Words. Designing Wordless Instructions” by Patrick Hofmann. The workshops are excellent value for money at only $200 for a full-day with a widely-known expert. I have always found them a mine of practical information. Patrick is a guru when it comes to communicating with pictures. I’m delighted to report that Patrick will be one of the speakers at the Region 2 conference in London next October. Don't miss it!

Networking
The conference is an excellent place to network and get to meet people from all over the world. This is one of the big advantages of attending the annual conference; the opportunity to talk shop with fellow communicators from diverse geographical and professional backgrounds. Many of those discussions continue long after the conference is over. For the first time, the France community had a table at the Welcome Reception to show to everyone who we are and what we’re up to. The numerous visitors could take away a brochure about us, check out the results from our bi-annual salary survey, and discover details of the forthcoming STC Region 2 conference in London in October. Talking with a couple of members from the UK community, we agreed that next year all the European communities should consider having a collective table at the Welcome Reception.

After the conference I took a couple of days off and visited the Grand Canyon. Spectacular! And then there’s the architecture of Vegas to visit, particularly at night when it’s all lit up. Viva Paris Las Vegas (and make mine a Margarita!)

2006-06-15 - Putting Usability to Work

Manjari PrasharSeveral of us began the evening with an informal pre-meeting dinner and drink on the sunny terrace of FIAP's on-site self-service canteen.

The meeting got under way a little after 8:00 p.m. Jennifer O Neill, the new STC France Chapter president, made a few quick announcements and then introduced our two speakers. Manjari Prashar, an independent project manager specialized in Web usability issues, started off with a presentation of best practices for web site usability, and Valérie L'Heureux from The Human Interface Group, described how emphasis on document usability led to changes in the documentation and in the software of the Telenet digital TV system.

Manjari Prashar is a Project Manager for content-rich web applications. She is currently working in France, but was previously at MIT, where she was helped manage usability requirements for many of MIT's web sites.

Manjari discussed a very pragmatic approach to the web communications process based on thorough user and task analysis and testing. She cited Alan Cooper and Jacob Nielsen with illustrations from sites she developed. Because Manjari does not have a developer or technical communicator background, her project manager approach was particularly interesting. If we put the emphasis on usability, our backgrounds matter very little because we will all be striving for the same result - user satisfaction.

There was a question about the difference between a web application and a web site in that they may have different usability issues and in the short time we had, there was no solution. However, the basics are the same - users must find what they are looking for or be able to do what they want to do.

Valerie L'Heureux, of The Human Interface Group, showed how a well-implemented usability and documentation process led to the Telenet Digital TV documentation set. This documentation won the 2005 Trans European Technical Communications Competition Best of Show Award.

Valerie discussed the documentation process, which was made more difficult for her group because the project was top secret. The different developers, marketing people and others all had different pieces of information and their information frequently conflicted. The documentation team had to invent the personas to represent the users of this new product (the use of personas is discussed extensively in the works of Alan Cooper). In testing, they discovered that they would need even more conceptual content because the users were so unfamiliar with the product, which allows much more than standard TV interaction.

The documentation team was involved with product usability and document usability from the start. Telenet Digital TV took into account many of the constructive criticisms from the competition judges. They united the two manuals into one and created a quick guide for advanced users. They are proud of their prize-winning documentation and show it on the new editions of their manuals by displaying their winning rosette from the STC Trans European Technical Communication Competition prominently on the front cover.

2006-09-21: STC France Open House

STC France held an open house meeting on September 21 and drew a crowd of about 20 people.

We opened with a short introduction of the STC for all those who were not yet members and announced our main objective for this year: Raise our profile. To help us reach this goal, we presented attendees with a wide range of volunteer opportunities and invited everyone to sign up to participate. We are extending this invitation to all our members, so even if you did not attend the meeting, please consider signing up as a volunteer. Areas where you can contribute include:

• Speakers - Give a presentation. Share your experience and expertise. Tell us what you've done, good experiences, bad ones, what you'd like to do better. You can also help find good speakers and topics.
• Program - Working on programs for meetings and the conference involves doing lots of small (and large) tasks. Sharing the tasks makes it all easier to handle - from making sure we have a venue, to signing on the speakers and sponsors. It's a lot of fun and you gain valuable experience.
• Sponsors - Meetings and the conference cost more than you might imagine. STC France has always tried to make its events as inexpensive as possible, especially to members. Help us find sponsors so we can maintain the tradition.
• Education - There are not many programs for technical communicators in France. We need to reach out to them. We also need to create educational opportunities in the STC France Chapter.
• Membership - We have recently welcomed some new members and some returning members. Help us continue the membership drive.
• Competition - The Trans-European Competition originated as the France Chapter Competition. Our chapter is still a major contributor. Volunteer to be a judge or enter the competition. Help us organize the awards ceremony to be held in conjunction with our annual conference.
• Web - If you are interested in making our website even better, please sign up.
• Newsletter - The newsletter could use an editor and contributors. Distribution via the website makes publication much easier.
• Volunteer coordinator - A volunteer coordinator helps match the volunteers with the best position.
• Elected board members - STC France must have an elected board. Please volunteer to be our new secretary or V.P. Programs.

The meeting provided plenty of time for informal discussion and ended with a free cocktail for all attendees. Several people were able to hook up with former colleagues or exchange contact details with other attendees with similar interests. When you consider that the vast majority of jobs in our profession are found through word of mouth, networking opportunities such as these are great for finding out what's going on in the industry, who's hiring and what skills employers are looking for these days. If you find yourself asking yourself these kind of questions, then why not come along to one of our future events, or better still get involved in organizing one of our events or education programs and help raise your profile, and the profile of your profession.