Contents
ISTC News
TCUK 2024
TCUK 2024 – Tuesday 24th September.
This year saw a return to the streamlined, online format of our annual conference.
TCUK 2024 took place on Tuesday 24th September from 1-4 pm and it was free to attend for all participants.
The ISTC Annual General Meeting for ISTC members only was held ahead of the main conference. This was chaired by Linda Robins as President. This was followed by the UKTC Awards Ceremony as reported in this edition of InfoPlus.
Next up were the presentations from our guest speakers, familiar and favourites from previous TCUKs and ISTC Meets:
- Ellis Pratt (Director at Cherryleaf): Presentation: “Technical Communicators and Generative AI: What’s going on?”
- Scott Kubie “It’s all UX Content”.
Each presentation was followed by a questions and answers session, with delegates and the speaker. If you missed the event, the videos will be available in due course.
Linda Robins ISTC President
UKTC Award winners for 2024
We are pleased to announce the UKTC Award winners for 2024
The entries were to a high standard with contributions from individuals, small companies and large organisations from several countires. Awards were presented as follows:
- One Overall Winner
- One Merit Award with Judges’ Commendation
- Four Merit Awards.
The awards ceremoney is now available on our YouTube channel here. All of the winning entries are listed below.
For more in-depth details of the entries and the judges’ comments, see the notes from the Awards ceremony on the ISTC website: 2024 Award Winners page.
Overall Winner
Title: Dry Dive Virtual Reality App
Company: Calder Communication Services and Sandford Tech.
Names: Fi Parker and Matt Peacock (Calder Communication Services Limited), Kevin Puryer, Matt Sanders and Joe Duffy (Sandford Tech Limited)
Merit Award Winners
Merit Award Winner (Judges’ Commendation)
Title: Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) Horticulture Manual and Training Guides
Company: The i-Team
Name: Motia Khan
Merit Award Winners
Title: Crafting Docs for Success: An End-to-End Approach to Developer Documentation
Name: Diana Lakatos
Title: Now Assist for Customer Service Management (CSM)
Company: Service Now
Names: Liz Malone, Namita Roy, Dawn Jurek, Shirley Ask
Title: Codat Docs
Company: Codat (Experience@Codat)
Name: Polina Zaichkina
Title: IBM z/OS Container Platform
Company: IBM Corporation
Names: Carol Bahruth, Bethany Simpson, Yi Chen (Erin) Zhang
IJTC Update
After saying in the last issue of InfoPlus that the IJTC Newsletter would be quarterly, we’re going to change this to monthly instead.
This will enable us to get the latest articles out to our IJTC members around the world much quicker. Expect the newsletter around the middle of the month going forward.
Advertise in InfoPlus
Get your company or products noticed in the TechComms community! We are offering new opportunities for advertising in our monthly InfoPlus newsletter.
These adverts are banners to be positioned as you choose. Placement examples are included in this PDF, which also contains all the necessary steps and costs involved to place an advert in future editions of InfoPlus.
If you would like to advertise with us please contact Chantel Sankey – istc@istc.org.uk.
ISTC Community
Become more involved in the professional community through the ISTC Area Groups, join us online at one of our monthly ISTC Meets events, and find us on social media (links below). Members (once logged in) also have access to the ISTC Discussion Forums.
Area Groups
If you wish to start your own Area Group, contact istc@istc.org.uk.
Online meet-up with Cambridge Area Group
Open to anyone involved in communication from any location, the Cambridge Area Group hosts a regular, free Zoom meeting. It is the second Thursday of the month at 6pm for approximately 40 minutes. Contact cambridge_areagroup@istc.org.uk
for more information.
London Area Group
The next London Area Group meetup is pencilled in for Wednesday 16th October.
The location is, by default, near the Royal Festival Hall at The Southbank Centre.
We can meet either inside (e.g. in the foyer) or outside (e.g. at the bench outside of the Foyles). Check the exact location in the WhatsApp chat for the group at the time of meeting as it’s decided in the moment, depending on the environment.
ISTC Meets
We’re back and ready to start offering our ISTC Meets once again. For full details of the upcoming speakers, and for all future ISTC Meets, please visit our website.
If you contact ISTC directly, istc@istc.org.uk, they can add you to the ISTC Meets mailing list.
Social Media
- Twitter (now X)
- ISTC Community (Facebook group)
- ISTC (Facebook page)
- TCUK (Facebook page)
- ISTC (LinkedIn group)
- TCUK (LinkedIn group)
Community Forums
The forums are available to all members once you have logged into the ISTC website.
A bit of AI … poking and prodding.
We recently did some experiments using an AI tool called YouTube Summarized. This tool will generate a summarized report of the content of any video on YouTube and put it into a nice looking PDF file. It’s a browser-based plugin and will put a large red button underneath your YouTube videos.
We acquired a 7 day trial and tested it on some of the older ISTC Meets that exist on our ISTC YouTube channel. The generated PDFs will be used to add extra oomph! to the ISTC Meets section on the ISTC website at some point.
The only problem we faced was that it really didn’t like a UK-based video recording (in English) from our man in Portugal (Joaquim Baptista). Note that what happened wasn’t the fault of YouTube Summarized.
YouTube, assumed the whole of his English language talk was actually in Portugese. So it would only provide Portugese captions. Nothing in English was generated. We are chalking this one up to Google, as the owners of YouTube, trying to be too helpful?
Upcoming Events
We’ve got a nice selection in October (and a few in November). Some are small webinars, whereas others are multi-day behemoths! All of their details are below:
Title: Tempo presents – Navigating Collaboration
Date: October 3rd 2024
Online/In-Person: Online webinar, 2 hours.
Website: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/tempo-presents-navigating-collaboration-tickets-1014410989577
About:
In October, we’re covering collaboration, because we’ve all had challenges working with cross-functional stakeholders, or fostering collaboration between content and other disciplines. People problems can be tricky to navigate, but don’t worry, we’ve got you.
Title: ProductCon
Date: October 16th 2024
Online/In-Person: San Francisco (Free tickets available via website)
Website: https://productschool.com/productcon
About:
Organised by Product School and structured around the hottest topics in Product, ProductCon takes place four times per year, and gathers product professionals from all over the world. This is held 4 times a year. London is next in line after this event in February 2025.
Title: iiRDS webinar
Date: October 22nd 2024
Online/In-Person: Online, 1 hour webinar
Website: https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/6848463645885383002
About:
Delivering Intelligent Information to Enable the Digital Twin for Medium-sized Enterprises with Knick and plusmeta. This webinar showcases an implementation project of the iiRDS metadata model at Knick, a medium-sized enterprise embracing the challenges of digital transformation.
Title: The LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy and Technical Communication Management
Date: October 27th – 30th 2024
Online/In-Person: Portland, Oregon
Website: https://lavacon.org/
About:
LavaCon started in Hawaii (hence our name) to help organizations use state-of-the-art authoring technologies to reduce publication and support costs, generate revenue, and improve the customer experience.
Title: TC World Conference
Date: November 5th–7th 2024
Online/In-Person: In-Person. Stuttgart, Germany.
Website: https://tcworldconference.tekom.de/
About:
As one of the bigger events in the European tech comms calender, TC World will have over 200 top-class technical presentations, partner presentations, workshops, tutorials and meetups in German and English.
This will include many topics ranging from content creation and terminology management to visual communication, UX, and content strategy. Particular focus is on the topic of law and standards with valuable insights into the latest developments and best practices on current legal developments, instructional videos and product safety.
Title: AI-based iiRDS tagging of technical documents as an example of applied and collaborative research (via IUNTC)
Date: November 14th 2024
Online/In-Person: Online
Website: https://www.technical-communication.org/technical-writing/international-university-network-in-technical-communication-1
About:
The presentation gives an insight into the different phases of the implementation of an application-oriented research project in cooperation with an SME.
At the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, Campus Hagenberg, the research group AIST (advanced information systems and technology), together with text-it Produktdokumentation GmbH, is developing an AI-based research prototype to automatically tag technical documents with iiRDS tags.
Note that IUNTC is organised by TekCom Europe and there are multiple webinars hosted by them throughout the year.
Training Courses
Accredited courses have been reviewed by a professional panel of experienced ISTC members. A course listed as “ISTC Accredited” means that the panel believes the course meets its stated objectives and is suitable for its intended audience.
Course providers have to apply for renewal of accreditation every 2 years, which helps to ensure the courses reflect current best practice.
Armada
The Armada course (run over 5 days) is available either online or via an in-person classroom-based course. The next two dates are:
- Reading – Classroom-based & Online – December 2nd-6th 2024
There are also classses available at their Birmingham / Bromsgrove, Cardiff, Manchester, Milton Keynes, Nottingham and Sheffield Training Centres. These would need to be arranged upon request.
For further details, see www.armada.co.uk/course/tatp.
Cherryleaf
The Cherryleaf courses are available online and can be booked for single tech comm people or as a group.
Technical Writer – Induction Course: https://cherryleaf.teachable.com/p/technical-writer-induction-course
Using Generative AI in Technical Writing: https://cherryleaf.teachable.com/p/using-generative-ai
ESTON Technical/Commercial Authorship
This course run by Eston is online-only and is available any time. A discount is offered to ISTC members.
ESTON Technical/Commercial Authorship (Premier)
TCTrainNet – tekom Certificate training in Technical Communication
There are two accredited courses available from TCTrain and the dates they are run on are:
- Professional Course – November 18th 2024
- Expert Course – October 21st 2024
About InfoPlus
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Please get the information for theNovember 2024 edition to newsletter.editor@istc.org.uk by Monday 14th October 2024.
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Back Page
Here’s a simple cartoon to help you chuckle over your cornflakes. Whilst it mentions Epson, the same applies to any printer company that holds you to “ransom” regarding their ink supplies etc.
I’ve been sent some others for future Back Page content as well, but always welcome more if you have some. You can send them to newsletter.editor@istc.org.uk by Monday 14th October 2024. I’ll do my best to include the best (or worst) accordingly 🙂