Membership Meeting, April 2007
On Tuesday, April 17th, the SIG hosted its first ever virtual SIG membership meeting, via a teleconference call-in number. We invited only our SIG members, requested RSVPs for the 100 lines that we had reserved, and provided toll-free access to our US and Canada members. (We are researching the costs of trying to provide toll-free access to our non-US members, so stay tuned.)
During this meeting, we made some announcements about news and happenings in the SIG and then we had a technical presentation from Sue Kocher, on Editing the User Interface. We have archived the slides and materials in our Meetings Archive page, and we hope to post an mp3 recording of the meeting there after we receive it in a few weeks.
If you attended this call, or if you wanted to attend this call, we are interested in hearing what you thought about our first attempt at a virtual membership meeting! Please post a comment to this blog post, and let us know if you have any comments, questions, ideas, etc about any portion of the membership meeting.
Aashita Shekhar said,
April 18, 2007 at 1:08 am
It was a true pleasure to be a part of virtual SIG membership meeting held on April 17. The presentation was informative and inspiring. I could see similarities between your work and my experience. I would like to share my experience of working on an editing tool that may help you enhance features in your in-house tool.
Let me first introduce myself first. I was working as a Technical Writer/Editor in India. Recently I moved to Greater Boston area.
The editing tool that I used was a Microsoft Word Add-in that helps reduce the turnaround time for document reviews, by automating various review tasks like calculating Documentation Quality Index (DQI) and generating the defect log and review report in excel format. This tool automates the task of logging defects based on its severity and classification. It is important that defects be classified and categorised correctly, and appropriate edit corrections made to the document. Those defects are categorised as accessibility, accuracy, audience orientation, clarity, completeness, consistency, presentation, redundancy, and more.
As an editor, I used to assign severity to those defects as medium, high or low and log defects using the editing tool. The edit corrections are automatically logged in MS WORD. After I had finished editing, I used to generate defect log in an excel format. This excel was automatically generated by the editing tool.
The benefits of using this editing tool are manifold, such as:
• Providing a numerical analysis of document’s quality
• Indicating the specific problem areas of the document to both the author and the reviewer. Example: A high incidence of the “consistency” defect type along with the related remarks indicates the key problem area of the document and focussed action can be taken to rectify this.
• Maintaining record of the remarks of the reviewer and the author’s response to them.
• Providing the two way communication.
Example: The author may not be able to implement a formatting suggestion by the reviewer and can document the reason in the defect log.
• Improving both the author’s documentation skills as well as reviewer’s understanding of the document.
• Providing a standardized method of editing across the enterprise.
Hope this helps.
mcorbin said,
April 18, 2007 at 2:04 pm
Wow! This sounds fantastic. I’ll contact you offline to see if we can have you tell us more or present at a future membership meeting! We’re glad that you found the first membership meeting so useful.
violet said,
May 30, 2007 at 2:11 pm
I really enjoyed this format. The course materials were a sufficient replacement to a shared or remote desktop experience.
My only comment is to remind users beforehand to mute their telephone receivers.
I would happily participate in future events of this sort.
Marjorie said,
May 30, 2007 at 2:14 pm
I agree with Violet’s comments above and am looking forward to the next virtual SIG meeting.