This 1-hour session will introduce you to best practices in design and typography for technical communication and will include plenty of practical advice that you can use right away to improve reader comprehension and information absorption.

Read all the details, including registration now!

This webinar is sponsored by UTC Fire & Security EMEA.

Quality-assessment expert and STC member, Alice Jane Emanuel, will introduce an easy-to-use, yet comprehensive tool for document quality assessment. Alice Jane will demonstrate how this tool provides granular feedback so that you can improve your documentation, and provide empirical data so that you can track your or your team’s progress towards better quality documentation, improve your documentation department’s quality of output, and create useful documentation metrics.

Our Presenter, Alice Jane Emanuel

Alice Jane Emanuel is a quality-assessment expert with more than 15 years of experience in large-scale regional and international peer review activities. She developed this tool out of a process of research and development that included years of working on peer review assessment tools, working with other peer review professionals, and marketing the business benefits of quality to corporate management in a fast-paced business world.

Registration

Sign up today at http://stcwebinardocquality.eventbrite.com/. All the details about the registration process are there, along with the time of the webinar in your time zone. (If in doubt about the time for you, use the Time and Date converter tool.)

Pricing

• Free: Members of STC’s Europe SIG and France Chapter
• 15 Euros: Members of STC, CRT, ISTC, and other Intecom societies
• 30 Euros: Non-STC members (consider joining STC and the chapter or SIG today to get the reduced rate!)

Last April, the eruption by the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull caused an ash cloud that affected 10 million people worldwide and 77% of European civil aviation airspace. Over 100,000 flights were cancelled during the eight days of the crisis.

One organisation at the centre of this event was Brussels-based Eurocontrol who are responsible for the safety of air navigation in Europe. Consequently they know where planes are taking off and landing across Europe.

How Eurocontrol responded to the crisis

Aurelie Valtat of Eurocontrol recently gave a presentation to the Belgian chapter of IABC on how that organisation used social media during the volcanic ash crisis.

Usually Eurocontrol is a B2B organisation—they deal with air traffic control and airlines. They rarely received questions from the public. The volcanic ash crisis pushed them onto the public stage. The public needed information about their flights and the airlines were too slow for them in providing it. If you remember, information was often changing by the hour.

Before the ash crisis, Eurocontrol received around one tweet a month from the public. However, during the crisis that jumped to several hundred a day.

Eurocontrol used its web site, press conferences, Twitter, and Facebook to communicate with the public during the volcanic ash crisis. To a lesser extent, it used LinkedIn.

The human face of a company

At its best, social media allows a company’s human side to show. Although they were not used to dealing directly with the public before the volcanic ash crisis, once it started, Eurocontrol moved quickly to provide up to date information on flights.

The Web is a great source of information in a crisis. Their web site had a 5000% increase in visits during this crisis.

They used Twitter to drive people to the web site for information and to release information quickly as the web site could take up to an hour to update. The advantage of Twitter is that it is real time information.

One challenge it faced was telling the public about its Twitter and Web sites. Few members of the public use Twitter. Here they were considerably helped by mainstream media directing the public to these sites. The top referral sites to Eurocontrol’s social media sites were BBC, Le Monde, and El Pais.

In one week, their Twitter followers jumped from 300 to 11,000 and their Facebook members increased from 2,000 to 4,000.

Although they received questions in several languages, they only answered tweets in English as this meant that the widest number of people could follow the answers. They didn’t have the resources to reply in multiple languages.

Sharing information

Another speaker described how he set up a Facebook site to help passengers stranded with him in Bangkok. It was impossible to get through on the telephone to airlines. He placed on it links to the EU legal information on consumer rights as few passengers knew their legal rights when stranded by an airline.

Prior to the volcanic ash crisis, social media was not integrated into any of Eurocontrol’s crisis communication plans. It is now.

Further information about this meeting organised by the IABC: Talking about social media.

Wow! An STC event that is covered by the Huffington Post. Wow! STC France and STC Transalpine deserve a round of applause louder than exploding volcanos for putting together such an excellent event! I didn’t attend, but I can feel the waves of excitement pouring out of Paris. It seems everyone had a fantastic time. Diana Railton tweeted:

The Content Strategy Forum in Paris was the best conference I’ve ever been to. Many thanks to @stcfrance @Wion and all presenters #csforum10

It wasn’t all cruises and champagne, however. It was also a matter of getting smarter about content strategy, as Rahel Bailie says in this CMS Wire article – It’s Time for a Strategic Content Lifecycle.

If you are in technical communication and know nothing about content strategy, you would do yourself and your career and your workplace a favor if you sat down and read – and studied – the articles and slides coming in the wake of this amazing conference. Rahel Bailie’s discussion of the content lifecycle is the perfect place to start your studies. That’s because her focus is on the beginning – the strategic analysis. The reason that this analysis is so important is because it kicks off the content lifecycle. Yes, there is a lifecycle to your content! Go read what she says, and then you’ll be just as eager as others are to see her slides from the conference as well as the future discussions that post promises.

(If you need a break from the reading now and then, get the visual experience from the pictures in the Flickr CS Forum 2010 group.)

If you are wondering what content strategy has to do with technical communication, let David Farbey share the messages that he took away from csforum10 – and we’re not talking about the ones from a ouija board! Keep an eye on David Farbey’s blog for future meditations about content strategy and technical communication. Like many attendees, he’s been overwhelmed by all the energy pouring out of the conference and needs a moment to digest. We’re just jealous and eager to hear his reflections!

Exploring Editorial Strategy is a topic that will make you sit up and take notice. You’ll be shouting hallelujah when Jeffrey MacIntyre, Predicate LLC sings the “content strategy gospel”.

It’s so good to see mobile addressed in Erin Scime’s presentation about the possible return of shovelware. I see so little discussion in technical communication circles that it makes me fear the topic of “mobile” is being neglected. It mustn’t be! Erin Scime’s presentation should clarify why.

As Eyjafjallajökull calms down and people arrive home, more articles will be written and more discussions will be started. Monitor this SlideShare collection from the conference and Rachel Lovinger’s Delicious bookmarks to collect all your favorite news from CS Forum.

Finally, here’s the link from Steve Rosenbaum’s article in the Huffington Post as Content Strategists Gather in Paris, which was originally published in Fast Company as Filter or Be Flooded: Do You Need a Content Strategist? – exposure of the good kind!

Take another bow, STC France and STC Transalpine. You have triggered a vibrant kind of seismic activity in the technical communication world this month!

The organisation representing national technical communication associations in Europe invites you to its Colloquium 2010.

This year, to offer maximum benefit for technical communicators in Europe, the TCeurope Colloquium A new decade for technical communication: 2010 and beyond is scheduled to follow the STC’s Content Strategy Forum 2010 in Paris in April, creating a unique double event.

TCeurope’s exciting programme brings together experts from many countries in Europe to present a broad range of stimulating topics for today’s technical communicators. Speakers include Paul Strickland from the European Commission and Michel Lanque from Alcatel.

Subjects include:

• E-collaboration
• A European Commission case study on clear writing
• Writing English for non-native speakers
• Preparing for the future of the profession
• New applications and methodologies

- and much more.

Anyone interested in technical or business communication, including professionals, students, teachers, and translators, is welcome to attend.

Saturday 17 April, 2010 from 09.15 to 17.00
FIAP Jean Monnet, 30 rue Cabanis, 75014 Paris
Enquiries: colloquium@tceurope.org

Register online for FREE admission.

Mark 15-16 April 2010 on your calendars for the Content Strategy Forum 2010. It’s “where business analysis meets user experience and content development”. Will you be there, too?

The program and registration information reveals a rather dazzling lineup of workshops, presentations, and discussions led by leading experts and practitioners from the emerging field of Content Strategy.

We’ll try to keep up with the news here, but we also recommend that you subscribe to articles from STC France and follow news coming from the @stcfrance Twitter account. They’ll sharpen your appetite for an exciting forum in April!

The conference theme is research and practice:

The theme of the INTERACT 2009 conference, Research and Practice, addresses the issue of continuity between theory and practice in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. The main focus is on research that is reflected in real-world applications.

The INTERACT series of conferences has been one of the driving forces in the HCI field for many years, and over time much research has been published in the INTERACT Conference proceedings. In Scandinavia, where INTERACT will be held in 2009, the HCI research tradition has always had a strong connection to working life, and the aim to produce practical assets for software design has been an important research issue. But how does research relate to practice in 2009? Are research results spreading beyond the research community and applied in practice, and are practitioners looking into research for their answers?

The relation between theory and practice is an old issue that is becoming increasingly important. Has HCI been able to contribute to better IT use in practice? Are the existing methods and tools for the design of usable systems sufficient or is there still a need for new and better processes, methods and tools for systems development? INTERACT 2009 provides a forum in which practitioners and researchers can discuss research and methods for mutual benefit.

Find out whether there truly is a special angle to HCI in Scandinavia. The INTERACT 2009 conference site has all the practical details ready for you. Enjoy!

The Society for Technical Communication UK and Ireland chapter is hosting this event in Cambridge, UK, at the Moller Conference Centre.

Prices are lowered at this event to help out with the “credit crunch”: only £150 for two days for members of the STC UK and I chapter. Pricing details are on the booking site.

Speaker Lineup

A variety of top speakers on different aspects of accessibility has been assembled at this conference; topics include designing for all, learning about signing, meeting the needs of Deaf people, and what’s happening in the world of standards and accessibility. The latest news from the conference is the addition of Richard Hodgkinson to the great line-up of speakers. He’ll join us to speak about “ICT Accessibility… Where are we?”

Who else is speaking?

• Katie Grant , Raincharm, will discuss “designing for all” and what “accessibility and inclusion” mean, in addition to holding a communications clinic where people can bring in samples of their work that they wish to make more accessible.
• Pauline Sadler will teach you how to finger spell, as well as give you some very basic training in signing. Pauline will look at how style must change when you converting written text to signing.
• David Spicer, Aeroflex, will talk about how loss in different frequency areas affects the comprehension of speech. David looks at the effects of room acoustics and the use of background music/sounds in audio/visual on the presentation of information. He also discusses the different needs of hearing impaired people who become deaf and those that are born deaf.
• Pam Spicer, Norfolk Deaf Association, will speak about the NDA’s Listen Here bus that visits remote rural communities providing services to clients and the role the NDA web site has in publicity and outreach for the service.
• Leonie Watson, Nomensa, will discuss website design. People with disabilities access the web in different ways, depending on their task, location, experience and ability. Leonie will help you discover the access technologies people use, the challenges they present, and what you can do to your website to help people with disabilities make the most of the information you provide.

As Richard Truscott, incoming president for the chapter, notes,

[this is] a top class event giving you practical information you can use. We have quality speakers that help you gain a competitive edge for your products and services. This is a quality training and lecture programme that is useful and insightful as well as affordable. Including workshops on website design, accessibility standards in the USA and EU.

Registration and Hotel Information

Find full details of the conference on the STC UK and Ireland Chapters web site or at the Design to Read Web site.

Why not head straight to the booking site at http://accessibilitytechcomms.eventbrite.com/ and book your spot at the conference today? There are generous discounts for members of STC and affiliated organisations. The price includes all material, notes, breaks and meals.

Accommodation is not included in the above prices. Rooms can be booked directly with the Møller centre. The Møller Centre offers high-quality hotel-style rooms with wireless and wired Internet access, and (astonishingly for Cambridge) ample free parking. The rooms cost £87 per night plus VAT. Book (and pay) directly with the Centre by contacting Mignon Bout at the Centre on +44 (0) 1223 465501 or mignon.bout @ chu.cam.ac.uk.

If you want a room, book *really quickly* – as of 18th May, there were only 9 rooms left.

A social event and a gala dinner are also planned for this major event.

See you in Cambridge!

PS

How important is this market sector with people with disabilities? The US Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy just posted an article in the May issue of “Business Sense” that says that people with disabilities are the third largest market section in the US.

What’s the third largest market segment in the United States? The answer might surprise you. It’s not a particular ethnicity, gender or age group. It’s people with disabilities. The size of this population—54 million strong—surpasses Hispanics, African Americans and Asian Americans, as well as Generation X and teens. Add in their families, friends and associates, and you get a trillion dollars in purchasing power.

Read the full article in the May 2009 issue of Business Sense. Please share if you have similar statistics for Europe. A trillion dollars or its equivalent in Euros is a nice market to have!

The STC TransAlpine Chapter (TAC) is holding its annual conference – and 10th anniversary celebration in Vienna, 8-10 June 2009. Updated information about workshops, conference topics, speakers, directions, prices are now available.

Do not miss the opportunity to join this memorable event which features world-known speakers, like Tom Johnson and Ellis Pratt! Register now, places are limited!

Looking forward to seeing you in Vienna!

The TAC Board
– CJ Walker – President
– Claudia Basso – Vice President
– Janette Lynch – Treasurer
– Dian Kjaergaard – Secretary

Lively, round-table discussions will focus on:

• High level technology
• Input hardware
• User experience
• Applications and websites

The workshop will be moderated by Scott Weiss, CUA and Executive Director at HFI in London. He is well known for his passion for the mobile user experience, his first book, “Handheld Usability”, and related blog.

Who should attend?

• Product marketers seeking a fast overview of mobile phone components and the inter-relationships between providers
• Marketers from a classical marketing background looking to enter the mobile market or brush up their existing knowledge of the sector
• User experience professionals new to mobile seeking a solid technology grounding

The workshop will be held 23 April from 9 – 16 at 16 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4HW.

Cost is £375 plus VAT per delegate. A 10% discount is available when three or more people from one company attend.

To register for the workshop, contact Tomasz Kuskowski:
Phone: +44 (0)207 290 3430
Email: europe@humanfactors.com