TCANZ 2010 wrapup

This week I attended the TCANZ Conference 2010 in Wellington, New Zealand. I’ve already written some posts about most of the sessions I attended. This post is a wrapup, with links to those posts and some general information about the conference.

First of all, a very big thank you and warm congratulations to the conference organisers. This was my first time at a TCANZ conference, and I loved the people, the information-rich sessions and the venue. It struck me again and again how much care the organisers took of the speakers and of the delegates. As a speaker myself, it was wonderful to be invited so charmingly and to be welcomed into New Zealand so heartily. Thank you Emily, Margery, Steve, Roy, Luke, Emma, MaryAnne, Sarah and everyone else involved in creating such a great event. And thank you to Emma too for the scintillating, tantalising introductions to each speaker!

The sessions

There were about 60 delegates at the conference, and 14 sessions spread over 2 days. Nine of the sessions were presentations by invited speakers, on the topic of intranet solutions. There were also the introductory session, three product presentations and the speaker forum.

I’ve written posts about most of the sessions I attended. There were a few where I just sat back and listened rather than taking notes. Here are links to my summary posts:

• Conference introduction and welcome, by Lynda Harris
• Metadata: Key to a successful intranet, by Ann Rockley
• Building a great intranet, by Rachael Fogarty
• Presentation of Adobe Corporation products, by Ankur Jain
• Simple design choices for maximum usability, by Patrick Hofmann
• Author-it Corporation presentation, by Matt Armstrong
• Tools for collaboration, management, and delivery of information, by Rowdy Bristol
• Intranet publishing with Drupal, by Chris Daish and Matthew Hunt
• Confluence wiki as an intranet, by Sarah Maddox (this was my presentation)
• Video killed the redundant writer, by Grant Mackenzie

New friends, chit-chat and learning

It’s all about meeting people. Along the way, I learned a lot and had a lot of fun.

Here are some pictures of the conference dinner on Thursday night. The food was excellent and the company was outstanding!

(Click the images to see a larger picture.)

TCANZ 2010

TCANZ 2010

TCANZ 2010

The speaker forum

The very last session was the speaker forum. It was a fun, raucous, thought-provoking and above all terrifying end to the conference. 😉

MaryAnne picked 6 speakers as her victims. I was lucky enough to be one of them. She then took some scraps of paper, wrote the beginnings of some sentences on them, and put them into a cup. Each of us had to draw a scrap of paper from the cup, read the words on the paper and continue speaking. Instantly, with no preparation, and for about five minutes!

The phrase I drew was:

If technical communicators ruled the world, I would take on…

Imagine how you’d continue speaking on that topic, in front of an audience of 60!

Actually, we all acquitted ourselves fairly well. The audience chipped in, lively debates arose, and chickens somehow featured prominently. Well done, MaryAnne, it was fun and a great way to close the conference.

Finally

Heh, I’ve learned at last how to pronounce “TCANZ”. It’s “T-Canz”, not “T-C-A-N-Z”. Seriously though, this is a conference well worth attending.