Summit Perspectives: Frank Halstead

June 9, 2011 1 Comment

Welcome to Summit Perspectives. This is the first in a series of guest posts by STC Rochester attendees at the STC Summit 2011 Conference in Sacramento. We hope these posts will give those of you who were unable to attend Summit a view into the conference. Our first post is from Frank Halstead, Technical Writer, ILS Projects Group, Harris RF Communications.

Joe (Andres) and I are from Harris RF Communications. We met up with Heather (Ferrin-Germani) and Elaine (Lanni) at the airport on Sunday morning to begin our STC Summit 2011 Conference and as a dinner/social group. The Summit offers a very nicely packaged opportunity to explore a diverse set of topics and while it is possible that I may have been in sessions with other Rochester members, I only knew of those in our small group and a fellow employee from my ABB years who works in Columbus, Ohio. Of course, it would be great to meet the rest of you; but, I will need to find the time to make the local meetings.

My first session was “Cut the Fluff” with Leah Guren. This was a great way to start out, a down-to-earth basics reminder of how less can equal greater content and the fact that we are under no obligation to document all paths/methods all the time. “TechComm 2020″ (Tristan Bishop) was my next session. I think it might as well have been 2011 or 2012 extended since the only real trend I took from that was what is currently happening being morphed out. One good insight was the use of twitter hashtags and a reference to hootsuite.com (See what I mean). And, some of us still work in more restricted environments.

Monday afternoon, I took in the Certification session with Steve Jong. This is a first step in setting basic standards for technical communicators and lays the foundation for other focused certifications in our field. OK, in the “Extending Adobe FrameMaker Beyond What’s In the Box (Rajat Bansal), I was able to get back to a good old how-to session. Well, on the surface anyway. Vendors can never resist offering to do it for you

On Tuesday, I was able to get a session in that I had missed last year in Dallas, “Building Visual Explanations” with Don Moyer. So, maybe I will do that parade of vignettes and make use of some magic vision. Don is an outstanding presenter and knows how to keep everyone fully engaged. A great session! Well, going from such an open experience to “Structured Authoring” (Mary Craig, Pamela Kostur) is certainly one way to take that first step into content management. The presenters made a great case for their movement in that direction because they really do have many variations on basic products and systems that could benefit from reuse. We did some exploration work with this using Documentum as our content management system at ABB.

That afternoon I was back with the Adobe people (Samartha Vashishtha) looking at their community help with their writers (another great insight) and finished out the day with Delivering Content with Adobe TCS 3 (Matt Sullivan) and a few ins and outs of getting content single-sourced through to multiple devices. Do you have a favorite?

The “Organizing Help Content: Breaking Out of Topic-Based Hierarchies” (Tom Johnson) session had me hoping for a real breakthrough. What I did come away with is the need to apply better metadata facets to chunked information and to look closer at our points of entry in a world where everything is miscellaneous and every page is page one. Does this make you want to learn more?

Wow, Wednesday came really fast and was the surprise of the Summit for two really great sessions: “Knowledge Transfer” with James Conklin and “Mental Model Diagrams” with Indi Young. James had really good insights into the knowing-doing gap and offered much research into implementation science. Looks like some of us may want to be knowledge brokers someday soon. Finally, Indi helped me understand how to map out a qualitative approach to understanding and mapping customer reasoning using behaviors, beliefs, and reactions to the things we do from a user perspective. Naturally, these topics are more complicated than can be easily summarized here.

I do hope that you get a bit of the flavor and experience you may find by attending the STC Summit. It is well worth your time.

Finally, to my travelling partners, thanks for sharing a wonderful few days together and the joys of travelling – delays and all.

As you’ve read, Frank packed an amazing number of sessions into his days at the conference. His experience gives you an overview of some of the many sessions offered.