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Conference showdown
Thursday, June 19, 2008 — posted by Sarah
Tom Johnson's post about the STC conference has sparked a lot of great discussion. You should read it and the comments if you haven't already.All done?
It seems that the STC conference is getting mixed reviews, and people's experiences seem to diverge quite a bit. The reports from DocTrain West (Vancouver, May) and WritersUA (Portland, March) are much more positive.
Why is this? What makes the STC conference so easy to criticize? Are the
other conferences that much better?
Personal versus impersonal
With 1200 attendees, STC is much larger than either DocTrain (200ish) or WritersUA (500ish). Both DocTrain and WritersUA have well-known organizers -- Scott Abel and Joe Welinske, respectively. Their personal styles couldn't be more different, but they are both well-respected for their events. For STC, there is a Program Committee, an STC staff, and STC leadership. It's much easier to criticize a committee or a collection of committees than an individual.
That said, I think that STC is making some mistakes in their conference planning.
What is the target audience?
The audience for WritersUA is "user assistance professionals." The audience for DocTrain is "people interested in learning about the latest tools, processes, and technologies for technical communicators."
For STC?
STC is an individual membership organization dedicated to advancing the arts and sciences of technical communication. It is the largest organization of its type in the world. Its 14,000 members include technical writers and editors, content developers, documentation specialists, technical illustrators, instructional designers, academics, information architects, usability and human factors professionals, visual designers, Web designers and developers, and translators -- anyone whose work makes technical information available to those who need it.Wow, that's a mouthful. More importantly, that's a really big, diverse group of people. What happens when you try to put together a conference that serves all of them?
In a comment on Tom's post, I wrote:
One major challenge for STC’s conference is the breadth of topic coverage that’s required. You and I are interested in different things than the academics who are members of STC. Thus, you’ll find entire conference tracks that are targeted toward “others.”
Lindsey Robbins responded:
I totally disagree with trying to focus on academics and professional stuff. Academics have a lot of other organizations and conferences they can attend and STC sorry to say didn’t rank up there with my options when I was in grad school. I think it’s important for academics to influence the industry but its presence at the conference isn’t as important for a track. I really think STC as a whole should focus more on the professional side and development from entry level to experienced.
I think that the mission of the STC conference is to serve the needs of STC as an organization -- and that's different from serving attendees. Serving attendees one of many priorities.
If you said "to advance the knowledge of technical communicators," you win the prize for the most politically correct answer. I think the actual correct answer is, "to bring in significant profits that let STC balance its budget." That is, the conference event is supposed to be profitable and sustainable, but it's also supposed to help sustain the STC itself.
There's also the answer, "to provide a venue for the STC to meet and conduct its annual business" -- the honors banquet, the annual meeting, leadership day, and other activities needed to keep the Society as a whole moving.
I assume that DocTrain and WritersUA are profitable, so why are we offended by STC's desire to do the same for their conference?
The opening session on Monday had too many STC business announcements. Either shorten these or move them to Sunday evening. After the opening session, there was a two-hour break intended to drive traffic to the vendors. Starting a conference with a two-hour break is weird. Schedule is for when people are getting tired, like mid-day on Tuesday. They don't need a break immediately after the opening session. That just invites attendees to skip Monday morning.
Infrastructure
You've probably already seen complaints about the lack of wireless connectivity in the Philadelphia Convention Center. There was actually free Wi-Fi, but it was only available in some of the meeting rooms. The trade show floor had Wi-Fi @ $100 per day. I think not.
Unlike Certain Other Conferences, vendors don't get any sort of lunch provided. I was not feeling the love. And since we (as vendors) pay a lot more to get into STC than we do to participate at either DocTrain or WritersUA, I sort of expected some semblance of love or an attempt to at least fake it. The vendor location, which we immediately dubbed "Siberia" (with apologies to any readers from there!), was Not Convenient to attendees. I wonder how many people completely skipped the trade show?
The conference schedule itself was problematic -- others have complained about the lack of advanced topics and about the lack of information about topics. Where was the grid schedule? The session search was annoying. For me, it was broken -- searching on "O'Keefe" didn't bring up my sessions. I resorted to searching on "Sarah" or on the (known) titles of my presentations to figure out when I was presenting. Kind of a problem for people who a) were looking for my presentations (obviously, a cast of thousands...), b) didn't think to search by first name (!), and c) didn't already know the title of the presentation they were looking for.
Speaker issues
As a speaker, I should probably stay away from this one. And I got to attend very few sessions during STC -- I was in Booth Jail. I will point out that my percentile rank at STC is typically much higher than my percentile rank at WritersUA. In other words, assuming that my presentations are of equal quality, the overall speaker quality at WritersUA is higher than at STC.
I gave one presentation on the last day of the conference at 11:30 a.m. Several people told me that they wanted to attend but had to leave to catch a plane. I'm certainly guilty of leaving conferences early myself, but in addition to the not-great time slot, I was presenting at the same time as Ginny Redish and Jared Spool. Ouch. Might I recommend that the program committee try to avoid putting highly rated speakers in concurrent time slots?
Content
The STC call for proposals is ridiculously early relative to the conference -- and it's better than it used to be. It's impossible to do bleeding edge presentations with 9 months of lead time required for the proposals.
STC used to provide speakers with a $75 or $100 discount off the conference (and a requirement to register in order to present!). This policy has changed; speakers are given free admittance, but the perception problem lingers. Andrea Carrero writes on the STC Forum on June 11, 2008:
As a speaker in 2006, I got $75 off of one day's registration costs for the conference. Perhaps if the monetary reward were a little better (say, the day you speak you get registration--for the day--for free), perhaps more people would apply and there would be a larger selection of topics.The review process for proposals is opaque; if a proposal is turned down, you get a form letter that offers no useful information. I can think of numerous reasons to decline a proposal that have little or nothing to do with the proposal quality. For example:
- Sessions on this topics didn't draw people the previous year.
- Another speaker submitted on the same topic and only one could be accepted.
- The speaker had one proposal accepted, so the second proposal was declined to make room for a wider variety of speakers.
Again, let's compare Scott and Joe's approaches -- they look for specific topics, they discuss the topics with potential presenters, and they look closely at the feedback from previous years when deciding which speakers to accept. (Oh, and if you'd like get on the speaker blacklist, my recommendation is to cancel at the last minute because "I'm busy." They HATE that.) This process is clearly less objective than the proposal-with-review-committee approach, but I think that they are less concerned about objectivity and more concerned with putting together a compelling conference.
Social events
Many of the social events at STC were tied up with The Society. I attended the honors banquet this year for the first time in, well, ever. (I was one of 12 new associate fellows. Sorry to bite the hand that, uh, honors me.) Actually, the banquet was kind of fun. There's something deeply surreal about seeing my tech comm buddies playing dress-up. (Yes, I wore a dress. Shut. Up.)
But Tom makes a rather valid point about the need for social events that work for the attendees at large.
Also, as others have said, the band was too loud. The value of the conference, for me, is in networking, and that's hard to do when you can't hear each other.
A delicate point about attendees
The STC audience seems, on average, to be much older than the audience at DocTrain. WritersUA is somewhere in the middle.
I don't think this bodes well for STC down the road.
Why aren't there more non-U.S. attendees?
I can think of a few:
- Distance, obviously. It's a long way from Europe or Asia to the U.S. for a conference. The TCWorld conference in Wiesbaden, Germany, may be an easier trip.
- U.S. passport and border controls are an issue. Some visitors are offended by the fingerprinting program (all non-U.S. citizens are fingerprinted when they enter the U.S.). I am offended on their behalf, but there's not a whole lot I can do about it.
- Language barrier. Attendees who speak English as a second language may find a certain lack of consideration for non-native English speakers. I try to be careful about this in "international" venues, but I'm afraid that I don't consider the STC conference to be particularly international. That said, I think the first two questions I got after my presentation this year were in excellent, but accented, English, so I'll pay attention next year.
- Culture barrier. The STC conference is very American. Not just English-speaking.
For the record, I have offered to help STC evaluate proposals this year. (And have done so once or twice before.) No idea whether they'll take me up on that or not.
(Thanks to Alan Houser, who contributed ideas to this blog.)
Labels: conferences, stc2008
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