My Take on the 11th STC India Annual Conference @ Bangalore

"From the very first moment, it was more than a conference. It was
undoubtedly a carnival, which saw knowledge transforming into
valuable assets".
It was an exemplified occasion to see how a
voluntary organisation can rise up to deliver excellence in every
form, only by the sheer will power and perseverance of its
volunteers. No one can befit and earn this tag over and over again
but the India Chapter of Society for Technical Communication. It
showcased another successful and quality conference this year,
and who would say Recession has hit us.

The 11th Annual Conference organised in Bangalore by its ever enthusiastic
volunteers proved to be a knowledge enriching experience.
A round of applause to conference volunteers and especially
to Gururaj for organizing such a wonderful conference.A herculean
task but done with a smile!

I attended the pre-conference workshop conducted by Vasanth V
and Narassimhan K at Sasken on December 2. Vasanth' session was
on Documentation Program Management, and as usual his content
and style of delivery was excellent. The session had couple of role
play exercises and it added more vigor as some people
surprisingly found them in the shoes of program manager,
technical writer, doc manager and so on. The situations and role
plays were based on actual accidents set in Indian context. And, it
made it more interesting.

The Leadership session was invigorated further by Narssimhan
session' on 'Zen and the Art of Leadership'. The session made the
attendees out there to think beyond their day-to-day lives and
ponder on a lot of aspects. Questions that made me wonder were:
"Do you actually think you should be thankful for giving?" and so on.
The attendees actively participated in the session and shared
their personal experiences on the same. He also used the movie
Tom Cruise starer THE LAST SAMURAI to elucidate his points.

The main conference took place on the 4 and 5 December at the Lalit
Ashok. Over 570+ participants from all over India and certain parts
across the globe comprising of technical writers, freelancers, doc
managers, program managers, CEO and VPs and so on attended
the event. It had something for everyone, right from freshers in
tech writing to experience professionals. So, I had options at my
hands to participate in certain sessions or not.

On the 4 December, I got a chance to witness and listen to
certain experts engaged in a debate: "Do Indian Writers need to
get a degree in Technical Writing from the US and UK universities."
Mak and Gyanesh had done a survey on the same recently and used
the forum to share their report.My personal opinion is with due
regards to quality of education in the universities of India,
so long we do not have something substantially good like the
content and course structure from a Utah university and so on in
technical writing, I think it is good to have a degree in
technical writing from a reputed and a good university from US or UK.

Kumar' session on 'Asset, Liability, Income, or Expense' was worth
attending. Kumar spoke how the technical communication
function and the underlying processes affect, directly and
indirectly, the balance sheet and income statement of a business.
enterprise. Being a financial and cost analyst at some point of his
career, Kumar confidently showed the relative significance of the
technical communication function varies depending on the nature
of business -- product development vs. technical communication
services.

Next, I loved the presentation by Gary Manders on
documentation risks. Gary highlighted the areas of the business,
which are often subjected to extreme scrutiny to streamline
operational efficiencies, standardize procedures, and secure
quality levels.

Michelle kept me awake with her wonderful talk on Accuracy of
Command Documentation. Cisco has created a Java-based tool
that compares the documented CLI syntax with syntax extracted
from the source code and identifies inaccurately-documented CLI
syntax. Wonderful!


I would have love to attend the panel discussion for 'TechComm
2010', but then as fate would have it I fell down and had to seek
some medical treatment.:)

Next, I found myself as one of the speakers for the 'Project
Management Progression'. Introduced for the first time in the STC
India Conferences by Sandhya, it was a beautiful experience. I
spoke on estimation of GUI based doc projects at a stretch for 60
minutes. To a question asked by a participant of estimating an API
document, the answer is relative estimating technique is
applicable.

The STC India AGM was held next and the new council was
elected. Congrats to them!

After that it was the time to put on the dancing shoes. It was an
awesome evening with networking and cocktail dinner. Most of the
participants showed that they can do something in the
entertainment zone, if they were to quit technical writing. I
realised that I am a pathetic dancer, and why I failed
to qualify for the Dance Premier League. :)

The following morning had some interesting presentations. Inspite
of getting stuck in the MG Road traffic and missing the new
elected Admin Council introduction to the gathering (I am sure I
would love to attend Vikram' presentation on Time Management soon.
I need it badly :),I turned up to hear 'Managing
Content Using Joomla'.The overall idea of the workshop is to
enable users build their own Web sites using Joomla with the help
of Joomla’s extensive extension library and to empower the
participants to easily manage the content on their own sites by
themselves.

Next, I got a chance to listen to Joakin Nyback speak on 'Technical
Product Information from a PLM perspective'. The talk covered
namely in the aspects of : Overview of quality attributes, Increase
focus on documentation quality, Overview of quality metrics and
Quality escalation process.

Honestly, it was a good experience to attend Dr.Manjula's
workshop on 'The Product with No Manual'. Like many, I too got revived,
rejuvenated and re-energized through the simple yet effective yoga
and breathing exercises.

I have used a little bit of Doxygen and was looking forward to
attend Alok speaking more on it. Alok beautifully spoke on the
understanding the drawbacks of static API documentation approach,
Ascertaining the requirements for automating API documentation
and Evaluating the available alternatives (JavaDoc, Doxygen, etc).

Suraj Jayan's presentation on the upcoming tools was good.
Personally got a lot of information on Google Wave and will not
mind using it on technical documentation.

An interesting quiz rounded up the event. Congrats to all the winners!
Mak was once again in the peak of thing as he answered most of the
audience questions. Surprisingly, Mak was curious to know the incorrect
answers.
I could never figure out why, but that is Mak. :)

The 11th Annual Conference was unique and different in many ways.
The conference content and agenda was audience based and not topic
based.

I thoroughly enjoyed the conference, and I am sure you must have done
the same. And, as I left the venue bidding bye to all of my friends,
I felt "I had taken advantage of the professional development on offer". "And, maybe, it is a good time to ask you, "did you?"

See you at the 12th Annual Conference.

Cheers
Rajdeep