Managing Writers

I will be at both the Society for Technical Communication (STC) Summit in Atlanta next month (May 2-6) and DocTrain/DITA in Indianapolis (June 2-5).

At the former, I will be talking about employee performance evaluation as part of a “Progression,” which is the conference version of speed dating. There are tables set up in a large room, with a presenter at each table. Each presenter has a topic related to the progression; in this case, the broad topic of the progression is management and my sub-topic is employee performance evaluation.

Attendees join whichever table has a topic of interest, then every 20 minutes or so, the moderator blows a whistle (metaphorically) and attendees move to another table. The progressions I’ve been to in the past were informal events where you could talk with presenter about pretty much anything related to their sub-topic (or not).

Should be fun; I plan to prepare a “checklist” for performance evaluation that attendees can take away with them, and I’ll be prepared to discuss whatever they are interested in. If you’ve read my book, Managing Writers or the excerpts published in the Managing Writers blog, you know I have strong opinions about the topic, which I’ll be glad to share with anyone who stops by my table.

DocTrain/DITA is a whole different game. I will give two presentations, DocBook in the 21st Century: Yes, Virginia, There is a DocBook, and it is Alive and Well, which talks about the latest version of DocBook, and Getting Started with DocBook, which is aimed at getting attendees up and running with the DocBook schema and stylesheets.

More information about the DocTrain/DITA conference and my talks at my personal blog.