InfoPlus December 2024

ISTC News

ISTC Office December Opening Hours

The ISTC office will close for the Christmas break at 5pm on Friday 20th December and will re-open at 9am on Thursday 2nd January.

We’d like to thank you for your support during 2024 and wish you a happy and peaceful Christmas.

The next issue of InfoPlus will be sent out on Monday 6th January 2025.

ISTC Membership Renewals for 2025

Renewals for ISTC Members open on 2nd December and payment can be made via the website or by contacting the ISTC office (istc@istc.org.uk). Payment is due by 31st January.

Members will receive an email with details and can check the renewals page of the ISTC website.

Reminder of member benefits

You are part of a vibrant professional community, with member-only discussion forums hosted on the ISTC website. This includes job vacancies.
You receive four issues of Communicator, in your choice of digital and printed formats.
You have access to the entire Communicator archive online (from 2004 onwards).
You are entitled to member rates for Technical Communication UK (our own conference) and are also often able to obtain discounted rates for other technical communication conferences. In addition, members are eligible for a 25% discount on our recently published books.
All members can get individual support from our mentoring scheme.

If you are a Member or a Fellow, to provide evidence that you have been accepted into the ISTC at those grades, you can:

Use the letters MISTC or FISTC after your name (as appropriate)
Use the Members and Fellows logos on your online profiles and elsewhere (business cards, for example).

If you are an Entry-level or Associate Member, have you considered applying for full Member status?

What we have been doing?

We want to share some highlights of what the volunteer team on the ISTC Council and the wider network of volunteers and partners are doing.

We continue to provide a monthly newsletter – InfoPlus – that is distributed to both members and non-members, providing industry news, event listings and ISTC updates.
The UK Technical Communication Awards.
We are collaborating with the Australian Society for Technical Communication (ASTC) and the Technical Communicators Association of New Zealand (TechCommNZ) on an online journal called the International Journal of Technical Communication.
We provide resources to help with your CPD, such as recordings of presentations from our conferences and webinars.
We host a monthly 1-hour webinar series, ISTC Meets, where a variety of speakers from across the Technical Communication profession present a talk and engage in a Q&A discussion session.
We are working with universities and other education providers to identify courses and qualifications appropriate for technical communicators at all stages of their careers.
We support several area groups across the UK.
We continue to improve the ISTC website, making it both a resource for members and a way of raising the profile of the technical communication profession in general.

Your membership fee helps the ISTC to nurture, educate and support technical communicators from all areas of specialism. We aim to continue to do this and be even more effective for you and all our members.

IJTC Update

Our second newsletter update was issued last week and we’re working towards our December one to get it out in the middle of this month – mainly because the November one was a bit late getting out the door, so my guilt levels are very high.

In November and December we are sharing a lot of articles on IJTC, so keep your eyes on the website and/or read the newsletters to see what has been published. Thereʼs a lot more to come in 2025.

Naturally we also want articles from you, the reader, as well! If you have anything that you would like to publish then get in touch with me via the editor@ijtc.net address.

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.

London Area Group

The next London Area Group meetup is pencilled in for Wednesday 18th December.

The location is, by default, near the Royal Festival Hall at The Southbank Centre.

We can meet either inside (in the foyer) or outside (at the bench outside of the Foyles). You can confirm 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

ISTC Meets is our monthly series of live online presentations and discussions from industry experts across Technical Communication. This month ISTC Meets is:

“Discussion session – Surviving and Thriving as a lone Technical Author.”

This is an opportunity for you to share your experience with colleagues and ask them for any help and support you would like.

It is being held on December 19th and it starts at 13:00 UK time. Register for this Meet via our Zoom link.

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

Community Forums

The forums are available to all members once you have logged into the ISTC website.

A bit of AI … poking and prodding.

For the last month, Iʼve been messing around with NotebookLM. After seeing what Ellis Pratt could make it do during his presentation at TCUK earlier this year, it seemed to be the answer to my research needs.

NotebookLM gives you a maximum of 50 assets to upload. An asset could be a PDF, a website URL, or a YouTube URLs. I fed it every issue of our Communicator magazine from 2004 to 2014 – which is 46 PDFs in total.

Iʼve fed it the usual kinds of “what happened when” and “what was it like working in the Hovis advert era, grandad” and the results will be appearing in a future (January or February 2025) IJTC article.

Whilst it can generate a podcast, as aptly demonstrated by Ellis, I donʼt think I will be putting you through one that covers a decade of ISTC meanderings!

Using two of my remaining four asset spaces, I uploaded both the Welsh and Māori Language Acts (in PDF) format and started various comparisons.

This research is for a future article (again, for IJTC) that myself and Freya Morris-Cole (one of our New Zealand-based IJTC members) are working on. Hopefully this article will be available in early 2025.

Upcoming Events

There aren’t any events that I could find that are happening in December 2024. But we are looking forward to the ones below appearing in 2025. All of their details are below:

Title: Axe-Con 2025
Date: Tuesday, February 25 to Thursday, February 27, 2025
Online/In-Person: Online only
Website: https://www.deque.com/axe-con/

About:
Building accessible digital experiences requires a team effort, across design, development, management, testing, accessibility experts, and of course, legal. Axe-con is the first of its kind, dedicating topics to each of these key players. This is not an assistive technology convention.

Title: NORDIC TechKomm 2025
Date: March 12th–13th, 2025
Online/In-Person: In-Person at the Downtown Camper by Scandic in Stockholm
Website: https://se.nordic-techkomm.com/

About:
The main conference theme is “Technical Information in Heavily Regulated Industries”.

Key topics for NORDIC TechKomm Stockholm:

Future Trends in Regulatory Compliance
Regulatory Landscapes
Technical Documentation Best Practices
Technology’s Role in Compliance
Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals Case Studies
Cybersecurity and Data Protection
Global Standards vs. Local Regulations
Risk Management through Documentation
Training for Technical Writers

Title: tcworld China 2025
Date: May 22nd- May 23rd, 2025
Online/In-Person: In-Person in Shanghai, China.
Website: https://www.tcworld-china.cn/en/

About:
Key Topics for tcworld China 2025:

Technical Authoring
AI in Technical Communication
International Standards
Information Design and information Development
UX
Software Documentation
Globalization/Localization/Terminology
Content Marketing
Education and Career Development
Content Management and Delivery

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 dates are:

Reading – Classroom-based & Online – <check website and add dates>

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:

Expert Course – April 7th 2025

TCTrainNet

Please note that attending an ISTC Accredited course from the trainers above does not automatically make you an ISTC Member. You will still need to apply for ISTC membership afterwards.

If the training course has whet your whistle, then come and join us.

About InfoPlus

InfoPlus is your go-to source for staying informed about our profession, featuring news not only from the ISTC but also from across the technical communication community.

This complimentary newsletter is emailed to approximately 1500 individuals.

Subscribe to InfoPlus here, you can unsubscribe at any time from within the email sent out each month.

For advertising enquiries, contact istc@istc.org.uk.

Submitting content

If you have noteworthy information to share with your peers, please send it my way at newsletter.editor@istc.org.uk. We want to ensure that your news reaches as many people as possible.

Published and distributed on the first working day of each month, InfoPlus occasionally experiences slight delays until the first week of the month. Keep this in mind when submitting time-sensitive information.

Please get the information for the January 2025 edition to newsletter.editor@istc.org.uk by Monday 16th December 2024.

About our publishers

InfoPlus, the Monthly Newsletter from the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators (ISTC), is a valuable resource for the largest UK body representing scientific and technical communicators. Whether you are involved in technical writing, technical illustration, or other forms of communicating technical information, ISTC is the professional association dedicated to supporting your career.

Explore the benefits of ISTC membership and find out how to join.

Back Page

Hereʼs a change for you all. Instead of something humorous, Iʼve created a wordsearch using common phrases from within the tech comms field. Download the PDF, print it out and find all the words.

Download the InfoPlus December 2024 Wordsearch

The answer sheet will be distributed in the January 2025 issue of InfoPlus. If you like to see more puzzles, then Iʼll see what other options there are that I can create for future issues on a semi-regular basis.

However, I always welcome more if you have something else, be it funny or a puzzle. You can send them to newsletter.editor@istc.org.uk by Monday 16th December 2024.

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