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!)