STC Summit 2017 wrapup

This week I attended STC Summit 2017, the annual conference of the Society for Technical Communication. I’ve written summaries of the sessions I attended. This post is a wrapup of the conference as a whole, with links to my session summaries.

A huge thanks to the STC Summit committee, who’ve put together a fantastic conference this year. It’s been a few years since I was last able to attend a Summit (the last time was in 2014) and it was an absolute pleasure to be here again. I’ve met many friends, made new acquaintances, and learned what people are doing in tech comm.

There were approximately 600 attendees at STC Summit this year. The venue was the Gaylord National Resort in National Harbor, MD, close to Washington, DC. The conference theme was:

Gain the Edge to Get Results

Session summaries

There were approximately 85 sessions, with 5 to 8 sessions running concurrently in each time slot, over the course of 2 and a half days.

I wrote notes on most of the sessions I attended:

• Publishing in the Cloud with HTML5
• Catering for novices and expert users
• Emotive analytics
• APIs, maps and apps
• Adapting content for usability expectations
• What readers want
• Client’s language
• Engineering content champions
• Learning styles and the cancer experience
• Journey mapping
• Internet of Things
• Intelligent content

Other blogs

Kevin Cuddihy has posted session summaries on the STC Notebook. For example, here’s the post for Tuesday morning, which includes a writeup of my session. Thanks Kevin!

Here’s a good summary of the STC Summit from STC San Diego.

Social event: dine around

On Monday evening we gathered in groups and went to a few of the restaurants in the area. I chose Rosa Mexicana, where the food was good, the decor lovely, and the company outstanding.

The venue and surrounds

For a touch of local colour, take a look at my bookmark’s latest blog post about Georgetown, Washington, DC.

Here’s a view from inside the atrium of the Gaylord National Resort:

A view from the gardens:

The Potomac River at sunset, just a block away from the hotel:

It’s a wrap!

I’ve loved meeting everyone and attending all those interesting, entertaining sessions. Thanks so much to all the organisers, speakers, and attendees!