We often assume that our expertise is in communication and that we need to spend our energies learning new technologies. But technical communicators may be as challenged by radical changes in the way we need to communicate as we are by emerging 21st-century technologies. This talk presents strategies for operating effectively as rhetorically-sensitive multi-communicators in ill-structured design situations working with audiences who too frequently exhibit limited attention spans as a result of too much incoming information across too many media devices.

When competing for a job, one way to stand out is through your resume. Learn what some people are doing to get the job they want.

The more difficult the subject matter, the simpler the writing style should be. This session offers tips for simplifying your writing style by paying close attention to grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, and word choice.

Demonstration of how to create an Ebook (in epub format) using free/open source tools. Will do a demo/presentation of how we created Ebook versions of the STC Carolina Communique (http://newsletter.stc-carolina.org). Mini Presentation - 15 minutes.

Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware (http://tiki.org) is an open source, wiki-based, CMS. I'll give a brief overview and demo of this FOSS application and community that embraces the Bazaar model of software development (in the the extreme)

Lots of people have blogs but a lot of them lack focus. We'll talk about how to blog what your passionate about and how to get people to read it!

I will share various ways to communicate about a topic that is usually in Steven Covey's "important, but not urgent" quadrant, and one that can quickly become a buzz kill no matter when it's brought up. I'll examine the audience, context, and purpose (while invoking the Oxford comma) of the various communicative avenues available to approach this daunting task. I'll conclude with an example of a person who has "re-framed" the task in an effort to make it more palatable.

I will be describing the design points and thoughts that go into defining a publishing infrastructure. The presentation is a high-level preview of what I'll be detailing at Lavacon in Nov. and includes choices made for one implementation.

Do you really know your users as well as you think you do? This workshop will describe and demonstrate the many questions you can and should ask before embarking on a documentation project.

This will be a brief (5-minute lightning talk) description of why DITA knowledge can help you with your career goals.

Even when the subject matter is technical, communication is a creative endeavor, and the process of writing is personal. Personality affects our writing style in our preference for
• gathering information through research and reflection, or brainstorming with coworkers
• layering the details to form the big picture, or starting with a concept and filling in the facts
• understanding the product first, or the audience needs
• finishing a project early, or working up until the deadline

What is WordPress and how do you make it work for you? This will be a demo of WordPress and the various options it affords users. Come out and learn about widgets, plugins, hosting and delicious, delicious themes.
Yay WordPress!

In the traditional waterfall development process, documentation is typically treated as a separate project from software development. This has led to challenges in integrating the schedules, including challenges completing technical reviews and last minute updates to functionality. The agile software development methodology offers new opportunities for documentation teams to integrate schedules, eliminating many of the traditional blocks that have stood in the way of timely and accurate information development. When documentation is included in the agile schedule, development teams and documentation teams both win.