I received the following request from Nancy Halverson;  She asked me to post this request to our discussion list and blog, to reach out to the STC Technical Editing SIG members.  Please contact Nancy at her e-mail address if you have questions or comments about her request.

I’m heading up the team called Fresh Eyes for the STC Member Communications committee. The object of this team is to review the communications which are heading out to the membership - from either the Board of Directors or the from the STC office.

I’m looking for people who are willing to help create guidelines and use these guidelines to keep the messages effective, inclusive and good examples of our best practices.  I’m hopeful that we can find a broad section of people to help with this, I’ve got some international representation (I myself am a Canadian living and working in the UK).

I feel that I need some editors in this group. Your expertise in establishing clear guidelines and maintaining quality would really be helpful to the STC world wide.

So, if you’re interested, please contact me at nancy.stcuk@gmail.com.

Hi everyone!  Lindsay Snyder contacted Pat and I about helping her with a graduate school class.  Here is her announcement about her survey.  If you have 15-20 minutes and can help her out, please do so!  Please respond by August 20th, 2007.

My name is Lindsay Snyder and I am a graduate student in the Publication Management program at Drexel University.   I am currently completing an independent study on how professionals work as freelance technical writers and editors rather than full time employees of a single company.  Among the topics that I am researching are how freelancers obtain contracts, the pros and cons of freelancing, and determining whether freelancing for technical writing and editing is a viable option for the everyday professional—is it financially possible at every step of career, or just for mid to high level professionals?
 
I would greatly appreciate your participation in the following questionnaire so I may gather data about these topics.   The survey is available through my website, www.pages.drexel.edu/~les37/.   Thank you in advance for your contribution to this study.

If you have comments or questions about this survey, please contact Lindsay directly at:  lindsay.snyder@gmail.com

Hi everyone.  The SIG is slowly but surely venturing into the brave new world of technologies, and has run into a few snags along the way.  We have this great new blog-driven Web site and Newsletter, and we have started holding quarterly membership meetings, with an audio recording of those meetings.

Unfortunately, we have run into some technical difficulties with our audio recording.  We received a WAV file, which is over 60 MB in size, and are having difficulties posting it to our Web site.  Additionally, it would be really nice to cut out the up-front welcome, introductions, and ramblings and just focus on the really interesting part of the technical program. 

Doubly unfortunately, I have zero experience at working with audio recordings.  I knew to request one, and I have it, but I am stuck with how to best edit, manage, and deliver it to you our members.  So, I am sending up a flare, calling all audio gurus to step forward and help us get past these technical difficulties and provide the audio recording of our April 2007 membership meeting to all of our members.

Any takers?

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. 

[Editor’s Note: I received a request from Candy to post this call for participation for her thesis research.  Please contact Candy with any comments or questions (jenkins114@comcast.net).  — Michelle Corbin] 

Hello.  I am currently pursuing my Master’s Degree in English, with a concentration in Professional Writing and Editing, at George Mason University.  My thesis is titled “From Technical Writer to Professional Communicator: The Evolving Model of Documentation Departments within IT Companies.”  I will be examining Documentation or Tech Pubs Departments and Technical Communicators and how their role is changing and needs to continue to change in order to remain a viable entity in the future of the IT Industry.

As part of my thesis, I have developed a questionnaire for tech writers, specifically in the IT industry.  The questionnaire is a 5-page MS Word form, and it should only take about 15 minutes to complete.  The process is completely anonymous, and no names or company names will be used in the report.  Once you download and complete the form, simply return it to me at cjenkin5@gmu.edu.  Once the form is received, I will print a hard copy and delete the email, so no information can be connected with a particular email.

If you have any questions regarding completion of the questionnaire or need to contact me regarding any other matter, please feel free to contact me at jenkins114@comcast.net.

Click on the link below to access the web site containing the questionnaire.  Completed questionnaires must be received by April 20th.  Thank you in advance for helping me with my research.  I hope the results
will prove to be useful to Technical Communicators in providing insight on how to prove our value within our organizations.

http://home.comcast.net/~jenkins114/

Thank you,
Candy Jenkins
Documentation Manager
Northrop Grumman IT, Health Solutions