STC Summit 2014 wrapup (stc14)

This week I attended STC Summit 2014, the annual conference of the Society for Technical Communication. This year the conference took place in Phoenix, Arizona. The temperature was 40 degrees Centigrade (over 100 F) when I arrived. Phew!

Hot temps outside, hot topics inside. The conference started with two days of workshops, followed by three days of lectures and learning sessions. There were 7 time slots each day, with as many as 20 tracks running simultaneously. So, plenty of sessions to attend, plenty of topics to take in, and plenty of people to meet. I feel as if I haven’t stopped moving since I touched down in Phoenix on Sunday morning.

The sessions

I blogged about most of the sessions I attended. There were two more where it was just not practical to take notes. One was a series of 5-minute lightning talks, very entertaining, but too fast to do justice with notes. The other session took place just before my own, and I was very busy trying to still my nerves and get in the zone, so I didn’t even try to take notes.

Here are my write-ups, in reverse chronological order:

• 7 Archetypes of Video Storytelling
• Patient Education and Health Literacy
• The Making of “The Language of Content Strategy”
• Information Architecture Bottom Up
• Minimalism
• Google Glass and Augmented Reality
• API technical writing (This was my presentation)
• Key Trends in Mobile Publishing
• How technical writers can build personal influence
• Content strategy versus wicked ambiguity

For a full list of sessions, visit the conference site on Lanyrd.

Any more write-ups?

The STC’s Notebook has some information about the conference, as well as about the STC in general.

If you spot any more posts about the conference, please would you add a comment to this post? I’d love to read them.

Thanks and kudos

A huge vote of thanks to the STC Summit committee and all the people who took part in making this such a great event. From my viewpoint as speaker and attendee, the organisation was flawless. The Phoenix Chapter of the STC  put on a big welcome, and put in a huge amount of work behind the scenes to make everything flow smoothly. It was a lovely experience from start to finish.

Thanks also to all the speakers, who put so much work into their presentations. And to the attendees, without whom the conference would be so much the poorer. It was a great pleasure to meet old acquaintances and to make so many new ones too.

I took this photo in the Desert Botanical Gardens in Phoenix: