Got plans for May 2010?

After my summer of complaints and criticism of STC and its various issues, I was more than a little surprised to be asked to manage the Design, Architecture, and Publishing track for next year’s STC Summit.

Hoist on my own petard (my obsession with Wordnik continues)…what could I do but agree. Or, go into exile.

Several of the other conference organizers are people I know quite well:

• The author of Managing Writers: A Real World Guide To Managing Technical Documentation, Richard Hamilton, is the track manager for Managing People, Projects, and Business. He knows his stuff.
• The principal of UserAid, Paul Mueller, is track manager for three (THREE!) tracks: Education and Training, Web Technologies, and Emerging Technologies. He’s also the Deputy Chair of the conference. (private note to Paul: I take it you were not able to retrieve the goat pictures. Sorry about that.) Another excellent choice.
• Ant Davey of the UK and Ireland chapter has the Communication and Interpersonal Skills and Professional Development tracks. I’ve worked on STC-related matters with Ant, and he’s a great choice for this track.
• Rachel Houghton, Program Chair. She did great work on last year’s conference.
• Alan Houser, conference manager. You may remember him as the guy who retrieved David Pogue from a poorly timed bathroom break during the opening session. I’ve known Alan for many years, and I expect another well-organized event, in which he solves the inevitable emergencies with typical aplomb.

(I’m sure that the other track managers are excellent as well, but I don’t know them personally.)

Here is the description of the Design, Architecture, and Publishing track:

Choice of appropriate design and architectures can improve the efficiency, usability, and quality of an organization’s technical publishing. This track explores issues in information design and system architectures for publishing, with particular emphasis on systems and solutions for organization-wide publishing. Suggested session topics include:

• Visual communication, integrating text and graphics, page layout
• Single-source publishing, for multiple delivery formats, multiple purposes, and multiple audiences
• Methodologies and solutions for content management
• Comparing and selecting delivery formats
• Issues in structured authoring and publishing, including migration, design, and deployment
• XML-based publishing
• Using industry-standard publishing architectures, such as DITA
• Accommodating localization workflows in the publishing process
• Moving unstructured content to structure

And now I need your help in two areas:

1. Submit your proposals. The quality of the conference is determined by the quality of the presentations. And that, of course, is determined by the quality of the proposals submitted. Please send in your best stuff. I suppose you can look into the other tracks if you must.
2. Help review proposals. I need two or three people to help out in reviewing conference proposals in this track. I’ve done this in the past; it’s a relatively limited time commitment. You will be asked to read lots of proposals and evaluate them, probably in mid-October. Along with reviewers, I will eventually generate a list of recommendations for which proposals to accept. If you have significant expertise in topics in this track, and especially if you do not intend to submit a proposal of your own, please consider volunteering to help with this effort.

Some notes on this year’s process:

• The deadline for proposal submission is October 5, 2009 at 10 a.m. Eastern time.
• This is a direct quote from the conference page: “With the smaller number of sessions (for the most part) only one proposal per speaker will be accepted.” (You can still submit multiple proposals, but do not expect to have more than one accepted.)
• Two speaker references are required (unless you have presented at this conference in the past four years, in which case we will review your evaluations). I personally intend to put a significant weighting on previous highly rated speaking experience.
• In 2009, sessions were recorded. I assume this will happen again.
• The conference is May 2-5, 2010, in Dallas, Texas.

Get started with a proposal

If you have questions, leave a comment or contact me. I look forward to seeing lots of compelling proposals.