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