Han Yu, Assistant Professor, English Department, Kansas State University, and Gerald Savage, Professor, English Department, Illinois State University, are looking for interesting stories from technical communicators to publish in “Negotiating International and Cross-Cultural Technical Communication: Stories of Technical Communicators”.

Summary

We request story proposals of 300 words for an upcoming collection Negotiating International and Cross-Cultural Technical Communication: Stories of Technical Communicators. This collection is designed for technical communicators to tell their stories working in international and cross-cultural contexts, working for/with clients/colleagues from diverse cultural backgrounds, or writing/designing for audience from diverse cultural backgrounds. We hope this collection will be a venue for contributors to share their experiences and lessons-learned, to inform and educate fellow practitioners, and to demonstrate their value-add to employers and clients. Submissions that meet the scope of the collection will be followed up for full-length stories.

For more information on this and how to submit a proposal, read the full request on the ITC SIG website.

Candidate materials and bios will be available on the STC website in early January 2010. This post is a reminder about the upcoming elections – and possibly a reminder to renew your STC membership.

Who are the Candidates

The following information is provided by Jackie Damrau, Manager, Nominating Committee. Feel free to contact Jackie if you have any questions: jdamrau3 at airmail.net.

Please note that the election slate presented below reflects changes to the composition of the Society Board of Directors. Based on the results of the Knowledge-based Governance Survey of the membership conducted in August 2009, the STC Board of Directors voted during its 24 August 2009 meeting to amend the Society Bylaws to reflect the following position changes:

• Remove the Second Vice President position
• Remove one Director position
• Change Director terms to two years
• Allow Directors to serve two consecutive terms

A full copy of the revised bylaws is posted on the STC website.

Congratulations to all of the candidates, and thanks to everyone who expressed interest in running for office.

• For President: Mike Hughes will automatically succeed from First Vice President.
• For First Vice President: Hillary Hart will automatically succeed from Second Vice President.

Candidates on the slate for the 2010 STC election:

• For Secretary: Rachel Houghton and Steven Jong
• For Director (three positions to be elected)* Nicky Bleiel, Al Hood, Tricia Spayer, Makarand (Mak) Pandit, and W.C. Wiese
  *Lisa Pappas resigned from the STC Board effective 23 November 2009, which creates an additional position for someone to serve the one year remaining in her term. For the 2010 election, STC members will elect three directors-at-large, with the top two winners serving the two-year terms and the third winner serving the remaining year of Lisa’s term.
• For Nominating Committee (two positions to be elected): Lory Hawkes, Nathaniel Lim, Linda Mikkelsen, and Preeti Mathur

What individual STC members can do

• Ask the candidate a question. The STC Web site will provide a “Question and Answer” area where individual members can post a question for all candidates for a position. All candidates for an elected position will receive the question by email and have the opportunity to post an answer. (The page is STC Board Election, but it is not updated at the time of this post.)
• Endorse a candidate. As an individual member, you may endorse a particular candidate on Twitter, the STC Ideas Ning site, the STC LinkedIn group, or your own personal blog. (NOTE: Group endorsement of a candidate by a community, chapter, or committee is not allowed. E-mail lists that are administered through the Society office and subscribed to based on an elected position in a community, such as the Presidents’ list or Treasurers’ list, are not appropriate venues for endorsements from individual members.)

The elections page will include each candidate’s statement and personal URL for additional information about the candidate.

Note that candidates are permitted to contact individuals personally in addition to providing campaign information on their own personal Web sites. The STC office may also send out (maximum) two campaign messages per candidate through Society e-mail to those who have opted for Society mail.

If you are not able to tune in on the BBC at that time, you can listen to the podcast that will be made.

We also recommend reading the article David Farbey wrote about this show.

He writes:

Technical writers (…) simply don’t get enough exposure, and this is the sort of publicity that we, as a profession, desperately need. (…) I hope that this programme will raise awareness that there is a profession of technical writing, and that there are professional technical writers who not only enjoy writing the instructions, but are actually pretty good at what they do.

After the show, share your comments here, on David’s blog, or on the Ning site for our SIG (requires SIG membership).

The UK and Ireland Chapter hope to hold this event at some future date.