When I first read about the Society for Technical Communication’s effort to assemble a body of knowledge, I admit that I thought it wasn’t worth my time. That it wouldn’t affect me or wouldn’t have any big impact.

Frankly, I was mistaken.

The task force appointed to spearhead this effort gave a couple of presentations on the STC Body of Knowledge (or BOK, pronounced “bock”—not the most graceful reading of an acronym). I didn’t attend the first one, but I attended the second, where the task force members showed us what has been built so far at the BOK wiki. We developed a list of questions that we wanted the BOK to answer. This really opened my eyes to the potential the BOK has.

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While at the STC Summit in Atlanta, I learned the results of the Intermountain Chapter elections: 21% of our chapter had voted, and they unanimously agreed to my becoming president and our current treasurer remaining in her position. Before I received that email, I told a few people that I was pretty sure that I was president. It seems picky, but I didn’t want to count that chicken before it busted free of that egg.

I talked to some other chapter leaders over the course of the conference. In those conversations, I thought it relevant to mention my position. This is a generalization, but technical communicators don’t seem to care as much about hierarchy as members of other professions do, so it’s not like I had to introduce myself as a chapter president in order to get people to talk to me. But it seemed that when it was relevant to introduce myself that way, the other person was only too happy to talk.

Frankly, I ran for president because we’ve been without one for the last year. Our treasurer has been president in the past—more than once is the impression I’ve gotten—and she has been the heart and soul of our chapter, pushing it forward from her positions on the board, believing that STC can be a significant professional asset. I was a senior in college when she asked one of the professors in the tech comm program to choose a student to build a proceedings site that could be distributed on CDs to the attendees of an Intermountain Chapter conference. I was picked, and that was my first interaction with Marj.

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Last year, I came to the Society for Technical Communication Summit as a first-timer. This time, i came as recently elected Intermountain Chapter president.

Actually, I found out from our webmaster here at the Summit what the results were. No one ran against me, so I was pretty sure of the results, but I didn’t want to make assumptions.

For me, the Summit was an overall positive experience because I learned things that I can take back to my local chapter and use to boost activity—or at least to get some attempts going. I attended much of Leadership Day and the annual business meeting, which got me thinking about what the chapter can do to help members who may not have renewed membership due to unemployment. STC has experienced a substantial shortfall this year, just as many other associations have been severely impacted by the state of the economy. I found myself discussing opinions with other chapter officers.

Leadership Day ended and the main program of the conference began with the opening general session and a keynote by Shawn Henry, an accessibility advocate and member of the W3C’s Accessibility Initiative. Her main point was not just that we should make our products accessible to those with disabilities, but that when we do it, we benefit all users and can even develop better ways of doing things in general.

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Last night, Tom Johnson led a meeting of the STC Intermountain Chapter. The format was an informal discussion between chapter members as we took turns talking about what challenges we’re facing right now. I thought it was a very productive evening for those of us who attended. We talked about following that format more often because of the direct impact on what we’re doing professionally and the difficulty of getting speakers for every meeting.

Tom was making a comment at one point, and he said, “I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m a perfectionist.”

Paul Pehrson said, “Isn’t that why we’re in this profession?”

I had thought I was the only one.

Maybe “technical communicator” is synonymous with “perfectionist” after all. I can see the position of quality assurance engineer as enticing to perfectionists, but sometimes things that bother me don’t bother them (consistent capitalization, anyone?). What is it about tech comm that draws perfectionists?

Someone who wants to make sure everything is done right wants proper documentation in place for a project. She understands that an application isn’t complete if the users aren’t educated about how to use it. Documentation and training is seen by some as a detail, but part of perfectionism is attention to detail. Also, while we’re documenting processes and products, we’re always asking “What about this? What happens if…? What happens next?” We tell users the best way, the right way to do things.

So I think Tom and Paul were pretty accurate. Being a perfectionist can be stressful because no matter the current status, it’s not good enough. It feels like we need a support group sometimes. Maybe our STC chapter meetings should start with each person standing up and saying, “Hi, my name is George (or Jack or Flo), and I’m a perfectionist.” And everyone will nod because we all understand George (or Jack or Flo).

We understand that we’re not perfect, but we want the world we live in to be a perfect place. And it can’t be perfect without a few perfectionists writing documentation. Otherwise, how will everyone else know the right way to do things?

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Last week’s STC Summit in Philadelphia was the first society-wide conference I’ve attended. I looked forward to the conference as an opportunity to learn to improve my technical writing and find out how the technical communication profession is taking advantage of Web 2.0.

Here are some positives and negatives from my experience at the summit.

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One of the topics the panel addressed—however briefly—in the opening session of the 2008 Summit of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) was the need for us to have user participation in and feedback on our content. This was of interest because our team at work has been looking into doing this.

The irony of the situation lay in the fact that adjacent to the hall where this session was held, a number of vendors were waiting to catch society members’ interest and corporate dollars. In his presentation on using user-generated content in documentation, Scott Abel of The Content Wrangler referred to the lack of Web 2.0 software. An STC member I talked to on Monday after one of the education sessions said that she had asked one of the Adobe Systems representatives about Web 2.0 capabilities in technical communication software.

“We don’t do that yet,” the representative told her.

Fundamental problem.

Personally, due to my current experience using WordPress to blog, I’ve been exploring the possibility of using it to provide a help community for the projects I work on. Because it’s a blogging platform, conversation is part of its definition.

Right now, the big push—and therefore the big race among vendors—is single sourcing and structured content. That’s what they’re providing, but that’s only part of the puzzle at this point.

If STC has any clout, I would like to see it influence the tech comm software companies to provide us easy ways to encourage, receive, and store user feedback and contributions. Right now, we have to resort to JavaScript-driven links or forms to get feedback. I see it on the RoboHelp forums: If someone decides halfway into a 5,000-topic project to incorporate something like this, he’s got to use a find and replace tool or—some of us have resorted to this—manually going through each topic and pasting the chunk of code in the code view of each topic. Not all technical communicators are members of STC, but the society could advocate for the profession at large for this kind of software.

Our software has to make it easy for us to do what we’re being called upon to do in our profession. It doesn’t matter if all the software suites provide it, as long as the ability is there so we can make use of it. If they don’t provide it, our organizations may have to keep our money and choose tools that are both free and accommodating.

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In the opening meeting of the 2008 Society for Technical Communication (STC) Summit in Philadelphia, several members of the society participated in a panel discussion moderated by Paula Berger. They spent most of the discussion talking about how the technical communicator needs to convince management that she solves business problems—specifically communication problems.

I agree that technical communicators need to provide value. Anyone in any job needs to provide value, or there’s no reason to keep you there taking up space and expending resources. But if you’re valuable, management will want you to stay. Let me illustrate.

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