Find out all about the speakers coming to TCUK25!
Keynote speakers
Listed in alphabetical order by first name.
Frances Gordon
Narratology
Frances’ mission is to help organisations communicate in ways people can trust.
She is UK Ambassador for Plain Language Association International (PLAIN), and serves on the British Standards Institution (BSI) committee for Language and Terminology, contributing as an expert to the plain-language standard. She also sits on the International Plain Language Federation’s Localisation and Implementation Committee for ISO 24495.
At Narratology, she helps regulated organisations produce clear, accessible communications and draft generative AI content policies. Her clients include banks, fintechs and B2B SaaS firms. She has developed an AI-enabled assessment platform for plain language, and advises how to use technology to save time in evaluating plain language so that people can be freed up to play more strategic roles.
She lectures on plain language at the University of Strasbourg, and has spoken at numerous conferences about the intersection of accessibility, language, UX, brand, and financial and legal content.
Is your documentation in plain language? How to evaluate it using the new ISO standard
Identify and control the risks of GenAI in your content ecosystem
Piccia Neri
Piccia Neri
Piccia Neri is on a mission to prove that inclusive design doesn’t kill profit, or creativity: in fact, it fuels both. As a UX and accessible design consultant and trainer, she leads and audits global projects for companies of all sizes. Piccia speaks at conferences worldwide, as part of her calling to educate designers, marketers, and developers to put accessibility at the heart of their work.
Piccia’s current main focus is on empowering companies to create systemic change, by training their teams to embed accessibility into the DNA of their products and services.
The European Accessibility Act is here to bite you in the arse (if it hasn’t already)
Piccia is also offering an in-person training session while she is with us:
WORKSHOP: Enrol in the Accessible Data Visualisations workshop
Rahel Anne Bailie
Altuent
Rahel Anne Bailie is the Content Solutions Director at Altuent, an Ireland-based agency focusing on elevating enterprise knowledge through structured content, AI content readiness, and user adoption. She is well-known in the content industry, with books, awards, and accolades to her name. More importantly, she is passionate about content and has spent over two decades helping companies make sense of their operations, taking on increasingly-complex problems in the areas of content strategy, content operations, knowledge management, creative operations, and related areas where she makes order from content chaos.
Surviving the savanna: Adapting to an evolving career landscape
Speakers
Listed in alphabetical order by first name.
Beth Morgan
IBM
Beth is a Technical Content developer at IBM, Hursley. She works primarily on the documentation for CICS TS, one of IBM’s major software products. As well as being responsible for the documentation for one of the core areas within CICS TS, she is the lead for the CICS TS docs feedback Slack channel, team accessibility focal, and acted as delivery lead for the documentation of the latest CICS TS release.
Beyond her main role, Beth is one of the new co-leads for the IBM Z Content Design & Development guild, working to bring together the hundreds of technical writers in the Z Content community for skill growth, opportunities for eminence, and building stronger connections.
Outside of work she enjoys reading and playing video games, switches between various crafty hobbies (sewing, knitting, painting – take your pick!), dabbles in photography, and partakes in regency dancing.
Bethany Simpson
IBM
Bethany is a technical content developer at IBM, Hursley. Bethany has been at IBM for 7 years, starting her IBM journey in mainframe testing and development, and moving to technical writing 4 years ago. She is the cross-organisational lead of technical content and content strategy for IBM z/OS Container Platform, whilst also owning other product documentation collections that are part of the ETS&I portfolio.
Bethany focuses on the end-user and produces persona-led technical content, to ensure a great end-user experience. She is a core organiser of the Mainframerz meetup community, which increases external engagement with clients and partners that are interested in and working on the mainframe. Last year, Bethany was a merit award winner of the UK Technical Communication Award.
Leading and managing a cross organisation, cross-location content team
Daniele Procida
Canonical
I work at Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, where I lead the company’s efforts to produce documentation for more than a hundred software products.
I’ve been working in documentation for as long as I have been working in software. I am the author of Diátaxis (https://diataxis.fr).
David Bailey
aPriori
David has worked in technical documentation for over 30 years, writing and managing docs and other content for a range of software companies, most recently including Snyk, ServiceNow, Solifi, and NDS. He has written content for a wide range of software applications, from user guides to API docs, and has managed multiple teams over the past 15 years.
David is currently the Head of User Content at aPriori, where he manages a team of technical writers and trainers. He improves the aPriori learning and use experience through excellent documentation and training materials, and develops best-practice and best-of-breed content for information delivered to aPriori’s users.
David is implementing a collaborative content creation and management culture at aPriori. This includes aligning collateral, platforms, and people and using AI and automation to produce a scalable and automated user content culture.
David Jones
Lokulus
David has worked in technical documentation for over 30 years, writing and managing docs and other content for a range of software companies, most recently including Snyk, ServiceNow, Solifi, and NDS. He has written content for a wide range of software applications, from user guides to API docs, and has managed multiple teams over the past 15 years.
David is currently the Head of User Content at aPriori, where he manages a team of technical writers and trainers. He improves the aPriori learning and use experience through excellent documentation and training materials, and develops best-practice and best-of-breed content for information delivered to aPriori’s users.
David is implementing a collaborative content creation and management culture at aPriori. This includes aligning collateral, platforms, and people and using AI and automation to produce a scalable and automated user content culture.
Contact: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-j-bailey01/
Docs-as-Code in a small team: Practical lessons from the trenches
Denise Marshall
3di Information Solutions
With over 15 years of experience as a technical author, Denise Marshall (they/them) sees documentation as an act of teaching—an opportunity to guide, support, and empower every user who encounters it. They’ve built their career around explaining the complex with clarity and care, using tools like MadCap Flare, Markdown, Regex, and Git to craft content that makes a difference. They live for the moment that a confused user says, “Oh, THAT’s how it works!”
As a neurodivergent thinker and advocate of agile practices, they thrive in environments that value iteration, feedback, and continuous learning. Whether writing help content or navigating daily life with two young children, they apply the principles of agile—adaptability, collaboration, and incremental improvement—with intention and heart.
To them, technical communication is fundamentally human: it’s about meeting people where they are, offering guidance, and making things a little easier, one well-written sentence at a time.
Outside of work, they enjoy the creative pleasures of sewing and mending, the serenity of cycling, and the satisfaction of tinkering with technology.
Content planning in action: How structure drives consistency in multi-product documentation
Ed Orozco
edorozco.com
Ed loves designing for B2B startups. He writes frequently about how design can make us more effective in our personal lives and at work. He won’t shut up about keyboard shortcuts.
Ellis Pratt
Cherryleaf
Ellis is a Director at Cherryleaf. He has been working in technical communication since the early 1990s. He has a degree in Business Studies. He is also a Member of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators (ISTC), an Associate of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, and he served as a judge for the UK Technical Communication Awards and the DevPortal Awards.
Automate all the things? The present and future of automation in technical writing (AI)
WORKSHOP: Let’s Make a Video! – Creating Techcomm Video Content with Google Veo 3
Jo Stichbury
QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey
Jo Stichbury is a Principal Technical Writer at QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, where she specialises in crafting clear, engaging documentation about data science and AI. Her career began in software development; she authored a book on Symbian C++ in 2004 and then gradually transitioned into full-time technical writing.
Having also trained to teach learners with literacy challenges, Jo is fascinated with the intricacies of the English language, and its often perplexing spelling and pronunciation “rules”.
Jo lives in Wales, so also has a daily challenge in pronouncing street and town names. Whether she’s writing about cutting-edge AI or unravelling the mysteries of encoding spoken sounds, she is passionate about making complex ideas accessible and meaningful to her audience.
“Plough, through, rough, cough?” Why English spelling doesn’t play fair
Joaquim Baptista
Millennium bcp
Joaquim is the Principal Technical Writer at Millennium bcp. Joaquim has documented large and evolving software products that require industrial writing instead of just writing craftsmanship since 1997. Facilitation is an occasional need. Joaquim is a member of IEEE PCS and a leader at ISTC, APCOMTEC, and EuroSIGDOC.
Malcolm Cawood
Retired
Once upon a time, I wanted to be an academic: I began post-graduate research into political drama – a pursuit that took me into the byways of rhetoric, semiotics, and how people form beliefs and knowledge (epistemology). I never wrote the thesis and drifted into local government administration where I spent the next eight years. Following voluntary redundancy, I completed an MSc in Human Computer Interaction and Technical Communication, where, much to my surprise, many of the underlying ideas from my first stint as a post-graduate were directly relevant (or at least I think so; not sure my tutors agreed!)
This led to a second career as a Technical Author, mainly documenting repository-based business process modelling tools. After eight years, I moved into Professional Services as a consultant and trainer supporting the same tools. In 2015, I joined a large investment bank’s Risk Department, where I developed a certain degree of expertise in the modelling tool “Sparx Enterprise Architect”, finding my niche in data and information management: for example, meta-model design, report design, data analysis, and data management.
I left the bank in 2021 and since then, I have presented at various forums (both in person and online) on subjects ranging from cybernetics, Shakespeare as a model for Systems Thinking, literature as “equipment for living”, and whether Sparx Enterprise Architect is actually good enough to do business architecture.
The philosophy of technical communication: How does your worldview frame your practice?
Terry Howard
Babcock International Group
Terry has worked in the aerospace and defence domain as a technical communicator since retiring from the RAF 23 years previous. Terry is considered globally as an SME in ASD-S1000D. Employed at Babcock Mission Systems, Terry is the Technical Information Manager responsible for the Technical Communications discipline and overseeing the delivery of multiple defence programmes.
Babcock is developing a very capable in-house team of communicators which supply a global customer base for some of the most challenging defence programmes.
Vladimir Izmalkov
Canonical
I am a Technical Writer with 15+ years of experience and a strong focus on the docs-as-code approach and UX-oriented documentation.
I work daily with Git, CI/CD, and developer workflows to create and maintain documentation alongside code. Skilled in static site generators, like Sphinx, Antora, and automation pipelines, I collaborate closely with engineers, DevOps, and SRE teams. My background includes cloud platforms (OpenStack, AWS, GCP), NoSQL databases (TypeDB, Tarantool), data processing products (Kafka, Spark) and SaaS, with experience in both hands-on writing and leading documentation teams.
I began my career in academia as a junior researcher before transitioning into technical writing. Since then, I’ve worked in both large enterprises and a high-tech startup, and my career has even taken me to the United Kingdom—where I relocated thanks to my work as a Technical Writer.
Warren Singer
technical-communicators.com
I have been a technical communicator for the last 30 years. During that period I have witnessed the astonishing rate of technological innovation and change, and as a technical communicator been at the cutting edge of some of the technology that has shaped our world. For 13 years I was director of Cambridge Technical Communicators Ltd, a small Cambridge based technical communication agency. Five years ago I switched to a permanent role as manager of a small technical publications team in a rapidly growing organisation. I have also been an ISTC Council leader, responsible for CPD, Resources and Publications.