In years to come they will say great wine must age like STC India conferences. There is a sense of excitement as you uncork another bottle. The 10th STC India Annual conference at Pune kept the sparks flying and lived more than its expectations. The city of Pune played host to this year’s conference staged between the 11th and 13th December, 2008.
December 11:
The STC India Annual conference celebrated technical communication excellence by a Leadership day and Pre-conference workshop simultaneously. The Leadership Day sessions of STC India’s Annual Conference were held at The President Hotel, Pune. Topics ranging from “Tips on how to work with universities and colleges to start with Technical Writing Courses” to “What it takes to be a Distinguished Chapter” were discussed.
The leadership day got more stimuli with a captivating presentation by Vice Admiral SC Suresh Bangara, who used the clips of Bollywood movie “CHAK DE” to usher in the importance of leadership. He believes that leaders are born but leadership qualities can definitely be inculcated or bred amongst everyone.
Pre-conference workshops: The preconference workshops of STC India’s 10th Annual Conference were held at The President Hotel, Pune. Mahesh Gupta gave hands-on exercises to understand DITA concepts and their implementation in FrameMaker. While Vasanth educated the audience on managing technical documentation projects based on Project Management Institute and Agile project management principles.
A parallel track ran in which Sandhya Prasad educated the audience on their role in the documentation life cycle. She shared ideas on Project management tips, tools, techniques, Learn best practices on documentation project management.
December 12 & 13: Conference Days
Along with full two days of all the regular sessions: paper discussion, panel discussions, and the quiz this year Unconference sessions were introduced. Topics ranging from “Web 2.0” to “The Zen of Technical Writing- A sequel” were discussed.
Throughout the conference there were constant interaction amongst the speakers and participants were constantly networking themselves.
The highlight of the conference for me was the much-awaited panel discussion on “The economic slowdown and its impact on Technical Writing in India”. Edwin Skau presided over the session and the panel discussion included managers from different companies. The panel was of unanimous view in their decisions that technical writing will suffer due to the economic slowdown. It also urged the technical writers to start working on their weak points and utilize the time to build up their core skills and learn more on their domain.
Paresh Naik presided over the STC India Salary survey.
Amidst all this knowledge sharing, the conference was a hub for various companies to set up their respective stalls not only to share their company awareness but also to solicit feedback from the delegates. Also, there were contests organized and hordes of prizes given. The 10th STC Annual Conference at Pune proved to be a showcase of knowledge sharing and diversifying technical communication knowledge to all the quarters.
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