InfoPlus April 2025

ISTC News
ISTC Community
A bit of AI … poking and prodding
Upcoming events
Training courses
About InfoPlus
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ISTC News

UK Technical Communication Awards

Entries are now open for 2025 through the ISTC website. Please check here for details. Then fill out the entry form to nominate yourself, your team or someone else. If you need any help with your online submission, contact us at istc@istc.org.uk.

We are keeping the established guidelines. The Awards are open to any individual or team, whether employed, self-employed, contracting, volunteering, permanent, temporary, full-time, or part-time. We continue to encourage entries of all types, from traditional documentation to those demonstrating technical innovation and look forward to receiving yours.

ISTC Website Updates (Current and Future)

The website team has been making great progress behind the scenes to improve the Communicator archives; it is now easier than ever to find articles by title and author via the website search. If you’ve written an article in Communicator, you can now find those issues and link to their pages as part of your portfolio. Want to add a link to an issue for your CPD record? Find the article you have read and simply copy the link.

We have also been optimising the recordings from previous TCUK talks. These are already searchable via the website, and now use less data to listen to – stream them when on the move without worrying about data costs. This also means that we can continue to offer more resources for our members without increasing our costs.

This work on making our archive of resources more readily available to members continues alongside our work on the website as a whole. If you have any feedback or suggestions for how to improve this we’d love to hear from you via istc@istc.org.uk.

ISTC Mentoring Programme for 2025

We are pleased to announce that we are once again accepting entries to our 4-month mentoring programme. The programme is open to all members of the ISTC, regardless of your membership level.

Mentoring can play a vital role in career development. For mentees, having a conversation with someone who has “been there and done it” and is able to offer you advice and guidance can be invaluable. They can offer a different perspective on a problem, which can help you find the right solution. Equally being a mentor to someone else and seeing them having their own “aha moment” is incredibly rewarding. We encourage all members to consider applying to this programme either as a mentor or mentee.

Please see our website for more details on the mentoring programme, or you can apply directly here.

The closing date for applications is Friday 11th April 2025. The programme itself will commence in May 2025 and will run until the end of August 2025.

If you have any queries, then please email mentoring@istc.org.uk.

IJTC Update

On Tuesday 25th March, at 8:30am, myself (Mike Mee) and Warren Singer attended a Zoom call with our colleagues in Australia where we showed what IJTC offers. We’ve been invited back at some point in the future to give a training session on how simple Ghost is to use and not just for IJTC but for local groups who don’t want the hassle of setting up WordPress with lots of plugins in order to get a “club website”.

There isn’t a March newsletter as the February one was running late. There are, however, two new articles and both are by CJ Walker. They will be included in the April newsletter instead.

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.

Eastern England Group

This is a new group for the Eastern England area and it’s being run by Andy Smith (easternengland@istc.org.uk).

We are an online only group meeting on Zoom. Meetings are on the second Thursday of the month, from 6.00-6.40 p.m.

The first meeting will be on Thursday 10th April 2025.

Geographically, we cover the east of England from East Anglia to Northumberland but we welcome people from far and wide. Members and non-members of the ISTC are welcome.

Please email Andy for a meeting link.

Thames Valley Area Group

The Thames Valley local group meeting is at the Bird-in-Hand pub in Knowle Hill, RG10 9UP on the first Tuesday of each month from 7.30pm. All are welcome.

They rarely have a set subject but the conversation always has a strong tech comms flavour. Maybe something from recent news, something that has happened at work, or some new technology to discuss.

London Area Group

The next London Area Group meetup is Wednesday 16th April. This meeting is online this month and the link to the chat will be posted in the WhatsApp chat for the group nearer the time.

ISTC Meets

ISTC Meets is our monthly series of live online presentations and discussions from industry experts across the Technical Communication spectrum.

For our April ISTC Meets (April 25th 2025), we have Mattias Sander who is going to giving his talk on ‘Seamless AI-Flare Integration: Enhancing Documentation Workflows’.

The AI Helper Plugin creates a bidirectional bridge between MadCap Flare and modern AI chatbots. The plugin intelligently converts rich Flare content to Markdown and transforms AI-generated responses back into properly formatted Flare content.

To register for this ISTC Meets, please click this Zoom link.

If you contact ISTC directly, istc@istc.org.uk, you can be added to the ISTC Meets mailing list.

If there are people out there willing to give a 30 minute or so talk on their aspects of tech comms (via Zoom), please get in touch with ISTC Meets.

For full details of all of our previous speakers, and for all future ISTC Meets, please visit our website.

Social Media

Community Forums

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

A Request for Back Issues

In ISTC Towers we’ve recently been looking at all of our back issues of our magazine, Communicator – or The Communicator, as it was originally called. Currently we are missing a few scans of our older issues and we’d like to find these gap fillers.

To save repeating this list in every issue of InfoPlus going forward, we’ve added the list of missing issues to the Communicator Archive page.

A bit of AI … poking and prodding.

Unforunately I’ve not had much time to poke or prod anything AI-related in the last month – all down to the joys of packing up boxes with 12 years worth of ‘stuff’ ready for a house move!

I did see, however, that NotebookLM is being upgraded to include a new feature that will generate MindMaps based on the source material that you let it look at. Currently my version of NotebookLM doesn’t have this option, so I can’t use it right now. As soon as I’ve got the feature enabled, I intend to have a play around with it and report back on its use cases in the next available issue.

Upcoming Events

There are multiple in-person and/or online-only conferences coming up in April and May. All of their details are below:

Title: Convex, San Jose, California
Date: April 7th-9th, 2025
Online/In-Person: In-Person
Website: https://convex.infomanagementcenter.com/

About:
There are 3 days of sessions with 4 Tracks, the ever popular Technology Test Kitchen, content management solutions representatives, and the very best in industry networking.

ConVEx San Jose is designed with your specific needs in mind—providing strategies you can use immediately as you create and manage technical content.

Title: Information Energy
Date: April 2nd-4th, 2025
Online/In-Person: Online only
Website: https://www.informationenergy.org/

About:
This three-day event from Wednesday to Friday will bring together people, who want to explore the novelties of technical communication. Join 300 other attendees who care about current and future trends. Check out the exciting topics, which range from AI and other new technologies in TC to content strategy, professional development, and the business value of TC.

The entire event will be hosted online via Zoom, providing easy access for attendees around the world. The conference language is English. Don’t miss out on this exciting opportunity to learn, connect, and grow within the tech comm community. We look forward to seeing you there!

Note: There is an early bird discount option on the ticket price. It will save you 100 Euros if you purchase your ticket before March 18th 2025.

Title: prompt:UX 2025 (AI – UX Design)
Date: April 8th-9th, 2025
Online/In-Person: In-Person in Berlin, Germany
Website: https://uiuxtrend.com/event/promptux-2025/

About:
Europe’s premier annual conference at the crossroads of Articial Intelligence (AI) and User Experience (UX) Design, will be held in Berlin. Whether you’re a designer, researcher, or UX leader, promptUX offers an exceptional platform to explore cutting-edge trends, exchange valuable insights, and play a pivotal role in shaping the future of digital experiences.

Note: The first day is the conference with the speakers, the second day is when one of the two full day workshops that you’ve picked will be held.

Title: Write The Docs, Portland
Date: May 4th-6th, 2025
Online/In-Person: In-Person in Portland, Oregon
Website: https://www.writethedocs.org/conf/portland/2025/

Write the Docs is a well known global event and community for software documentation professionals, including programmers, technical writers, customer support, designers, project managers, and more.

With hundreds of documentarians from around the world, this conference offers conferences, networking opportunities, open-source projects, and lightning talks all about the art and science of documentation.

Title: Elevate by Trados
Date: May 6th-8th, 2025
Online: Online. Register via link below.
Website: https://www.trados.com/events/elevate/

About:
ELEVATE is the localization industry’s largest online event, bringing together translation professionals and academics from around the world to:

Discuss key industry trends, including the rise of AI
Learn about the latest product innovations and
Explore technical topics with RWS experts.

This year’s ELEVATE will include our annual RWS Campus event, making it our biggest conference yet! Over three days, ELEVATE will provide valuable insights and connections for everyone in the translation industry – from students starting their localization journey to seasoned experts.

Title: tcworld China 2025
Date: May 22nd-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
Globalisation/Localisation/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 – 16th – 20th June 2025

There are also classes 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 comms 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.

Technical/Commercial Authorship Diploma Course ‐ Parts 1 & 2 (EDL2D)

ESTON Simplified English Part 3 (EDL8T)

A discount is offered to ISTC members.

TCTrainNet – tekom Certificate training in Technical Communication

There are two accredited courses available from TCTrain and the dates in 2025 when they are run are:

TCTrain Professional course for beginners and career changers:

April 7th 2025
June 23rd 2025
September 29th 2025
November 24th 2025

TCTrainNet Professional

TCTrain Expert course for experienced technical writers:

April 7th 2025
October 20th 2025

TCTrainNet Expert

For ISTC members, TCTrainNet offer a discount of 200 Euros too.

Firehead

Firehead offer a number of accredited courses. They are supplied in a format of videos, PDFs, eBooks and assessments.

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.

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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 May 2025 edition to newsletter.editor@istc.org.uk by Monday 21st April 2025..

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

Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to find anything remotely “back page-ish” to use this month. There haven’t been any submissions from our members or via the ISTC forums.

If you have something else, be it funny or a puzzle, or even if it’s more puns, you can send them to newsletter.editor@istc.org.uk by Monday 21st April 2025.

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