STC Summit 2019 wrapup

This week I attended the STC Summit 2019, the annual conference of the Society for Technical Communication (STC). Thanks so much to everyone who organised, spoke at, and attended this event. It’s been rewarding and fun!

STC Summit was packed this year. There were more than 750 attendees and more than 100 education sessions over the two days of the conference proper, as well as a number of half- and full-day training sessions during the preceding weekend, and a half-day plenary session to close the conference.

The keynote presenter, Peter Morville, is a well known information architect and author. One of his books is Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, affectionately known as the “polar bear book”. Peter spoke about information design, cultural trauma, decision making, getting things done, and bricks-and-mortar architecture. This wide ranging talk made a fitting start to a conference about technical communication, in itself a varied and wide reaching profession.

Notes from sessions

With more than 100 sessions in just two days, there was no way I could attend all the sessions I wanted. Here are my notes from most of the talks I did attend:

• Website search with Apache Solr, by Scott Prentice
• Compassionate technical writing, by Robert Perry
• Headless CMS, IoT, and You, by Chad Dybdahl
• More than writers, by Alan Porter
• How analytics can change your world, by David Payne
• Mentoring and being mentored, by Carrie Sheaffer and Eva Miranda
• Optimizing your content like an engineer, by Sara Feldman
• The trending value of tech knowledge, by Tom Johnson
• Sketching is like technical communication, by Elizabeth Alley
• Improving docs and measuring quality, by Barbara Giammona

My presentation: Open source and Season of Docs

I presented a session about getting started in open source documentation. The talk also introduced the new Season of Docs program, which provides a framework for technical writers and open source projects to work together on open source documentation.

Photo from a tweet with thanks to @beckatodd.

 

Denver

The conference took place in the lovely city of Denver, Colorado, in the United States. Snow-clad mountains surrounded us. The weather was balmy for most of the conference, with clouds and snow threatening on the last day.

An innovative design for a table, on the 16th Street Mall in Denver. Even when there’s no-one sitting at the bench, it looks like a happy place to be:

Union Station in Denver:

The big bear at the Colorado Conference Center, next door to the venue of STC Summit:

More about Denver

If you’d like to see more pictures and stories about my trip to Denver, take a look at my bookworm’s blog: Bears and banks in downtown Denver.

Thanks

Another big thank you to the STC Summit planning committee for a great conference, as well as to all the presenters and attendees who made this such a great event. It was a privilege and a pleasure to attend.