The second annual Society for Technical Communication (STC) salary database report has been published, and is available on the STC website to members, free of charge. This report provides a look at the state of technical writing salaries in the United States. (Not a member? Consider joining today!)

This report is a departure from the traditional survey issued by STC in years gone by. The data used for the report is drawn from over 1.25 million businesses in over 170 American cities and counties, in 90 industries that employ people whose duties and job functions qualify them as technical writers. This new reporting method brings a new level of reporting accuracy.

The report, which provides data for 2006 and 2007, doesn’t stop with the reporting of annual wages and hourly rates for writers. It also breaks down employment numbers by state and industry, providing valuable information for professionals looking for information before an industry or geographic move.

Championed by STC’s new Executive Director, Susan Burton, this is only one of the changes that reflects the new level of professionalism to which the STC is committed. Susan Burton is presenting a keynote session entitled The Changing Face of TechComm and the Society for Technical Communication at DocTrain East 2008.

The Society for Technical Communication (STC) technical communication competitions offer unique opportunities for professional communicators. Submitting a winning entry is a noteworthy accomplishment that provides tangible recognition of your work. Perhaps equally important is the feedback that entrants receive from judges who are qualified technical communicators.

Unique to the STC competitions, this feedback can be of great value in helping you improve your processes and products. Participating in the STC competition process has its own rewards, and is a great learning experience. Competition managers, committee leads, and judges hone valuable skills in areas such as project management, time management, consensus building, and teamwork. Networking, making industry contacts, and being recognized for a job well done are valuable by-products of the competition experience. An article in the July/August Tieline ("Advice for Competition Managers") details important information and tips for community leaders involved in managing competitions; please see http://www.stc-cdx.org/tieline.

Whether you’re interested in entering, organizing, or judging a competition, please consider getting involved!

In the world of personality profiling, the technical writing field is dominated by the Meyers Briggs type of Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving (INTP). It’s not surprising that INTPs are drawn to the profession of writing. After all, writing tends to be an inward-focused activity, carried out independently, and involves the organization of conceptual material into logical topics.

Though social media uses the medium preferred by introverts - communication that can be prepared and posted, rather than real-time communication such as phone or meetings - it is, after all, an activity that doesn’t fit the profile of the average introvert. As a personal pursuit, it can be seen as a time sink. When asked to learn about this as a professional endeavour, it can be perceived as a world of hurt.

So what happens when social media meets technical communication? In what may be described as the next big shift for the technical communication workplace, where technical content converges with marketing communications, e-learning content, knowledge management, and user-generated content, the shift to a social media model in the coming decade may be as profound a shift as that to content management during this decade.

Rich Maggiani understands the insertion of social media into the workplace in ways it was not originally intended, He realizes that social media can be used to create efficiencies that ultimately benefit the effectiveness and quality of our work. He shares his knowledge in his presentation, Social Media in Organizational Communication: How It Affects Technical Communicators, at DocTrain East 2008.

You’ve heard about Agile development, or perhaps are being called to wrangler your well-developed process into an Agile environment. Whether the environment is Extreme Programming, Lean, or Scrum, the effect is the same. Change is often met with a less-than-enthusiastic response. However, what may seem daunting at first can turn out to be a work method that has distinct advantages in the long run.

To distill the lessons of integrating an Agile development environment into a single maxim, it would be to learn the techniques the way you would with any other tool in your toolbox. Become familiar with the strategies, shift your focus to what’s important in the process, and learn the ropes.

Christine Sigman, principal technical writer and documentation team leader at Endeca Technologies, has written an article in STC’s Intercom magazine about the challenges and strategies of adapting to Scrum. You can also attend Sigman’s presentation,
Producing Quality Documentation In An Agile Development Environment, at DocTrain East 2008.

Jeff Deck of the Typo Eradication Advancement League was scheduled to speak at Documentation and Training East 2008, but due to legal action documented in this article, he will be unable to attend this year’s event. Instead, we’ll be featuring Adam Hyde of FLOSS Manuals, whose keynote presentation, Read, Write, Remix: The FLOSS Manuals Story, takes place October 31.

Deck has agreed to speak at next year’s event. More information coming soon.

It’s no secret that topic-based authoring is the hottest trend in technical communication today.  Even die-hard communicators who produce book-format publications are realizing the value of creating the source content in a topic-based format, then aggregating it into a linear, contextual output for consumption by the end user. More likely, the content will be aggregated into several linear, contextual outputs for consumption by different types of end users - and therein lies the beauty of topic-based authoring.

The ability to re-use the content source, without having to copy (and ultimately maintain those copies) is a distinct advantage for many communicators who want to get the most efficiency out of their core processes, in order to spend more time on the actual creation of content. However, making the switch to topic-based writing isn’t as simple as chopping up a document into chunks.  Topic-based writing is as much an art as a science, and a discipline for topic-based writing has emerged from the work started with help authoring tools.

Mike Hamilton is one of the professionals in the field who has been around since the early days of topic-based authoring, and has watched the development of this field into a discipline complete with industry leaders and best practices. Long before it was in vogue, he used topic-based authoring to create training materials, and then turned to working on the products themselves, as a product manager, to improve their functionality. Now, as VP of Madcap Software, Hamilton evangelizes not only his product, but the art and science of topic-based authoring. On Hamilton’s blog, he discusses the finer logistics of creating topic-based projects, such as using CSS stylesheets to control formats or the implications of using XML, as well as answering product questions.

Hamilton presents MadCap Flare - An Introduction to Topic Based Authoring: (Part 1), MadCap Flare - Content Control and Publishing Techniques: (Part 2), and MadCap Flare - Controlling Document Look and Feel with CSS at DocTrain East 2008.

Wiki evangelist Stewart Mader may love the technology, but what he really loves is the productivity that the technology can bring about when properly implemented. The idea that wikis help organizations share information may be the primary reason that they want to adopt a wiki, but the side benefits - reduction in email and meetings, development of planned and spontaneous communities, and idea hatcheries - can be teased out when the implementation is done with due thought and care.

In addition to Mader’s wiki consulting blog, where he provides a wealth of information on the topic of enterprise wikis, check out these resources:

• http://www.ikiw.org/21days
• http://stewartmader.blogs.wikiconsulting.com/
• 25 Tips for a better Wiki Deployment

Stewart Made presents Should You Call It A Wiki, Or A Collaborative Work Space? at Doctrain East 2008.

Alan Houser doesn’t believe in magic—at least not when it comes to XML. He thinks the fact that airplanes can stay up in the air is magic, but what makes XML an effective technology for structuring content has more to do with foresight, planning, and execution than sleight-of-hand. However, Alan does make his living helping organizations to improve their publishing processes, and much of his work involves XML. He cautions companies to not get caught up in the XML hoopla—XML is only a tool, and just as you shouldn’t hammer a nail with a screwdriver, you shouldn’t try to implement an XML solution unless it actually meets a company’s publishing requirements.

The enticing image of XML as a magical solution to every company’s publishing needs is a bubble Alan frequently has to burst as an electronic publishing consultant. He notes that while most companies are trying to achieve similar goals, such as improving publishing flexibility, and efficiency, the tools and processes with which companies can achieve these goals varies widely.

Alan enjoys the challenge of the range of business problems that customers present to him. Equally challenging is implementing solutions in different corporate cultures with different resources, constraints, and business requirements. Alan eschews “magical” solutions to real-world publishing challenges, nonetheless, his customers have come to rely upon his technical wizardry. His wizardry is actually just plain hard work, but there is no need to burst that bubble.
Alan contributes to the Group Wellesley blog, where he writes on various XML-related topics.

Alan Houser presents The Right Tool for the Right Job for the Right Output for the Right Audience: Expanding Options for Technical Communicators, and runs two day-long workshops, Using Adobe FrameMaker and Adobe Technical Communication Suite - Integration at Doctrain East 2008.

The temptation to communicate with pictures goes far beyond IKEA furniture assembly instructions. Although the allure of saving translation dollars cannot be denied, as budget-watching managers will tell you, the move to visual communication is a much bigger strategic shift. Users love visuals; the amount of information that a well-drawn illustration or a short video can convey is much richer than what can be conveyed in a similar block of text.

Using a visual form to communicate isn’t as simple as it seems. Effective visual communication has its own localization issues. Whereas localization of text has translation issues between languages, graphics also have specific cultural contexts that have to be taken into consideration. From culture-appropriate colors to culture-specific contexts, graphics and videos are imbued with meta-messages. For example, viewing the instructional videos on YouTube can transmit information about the country, culture, and generation. When the graphics are captioned, the labelling process adds its own complications.

To learn more about communicating using visuals, visit the Eserver TC Library. The Content Wrangler community also has a localization and globalization group, moderated by Maxwell Hoffman of Welocalize, for documentation and help.

Maxwell Hoffman presents Do You See What I See?: Optimizing Visual and Textual Content for Global Audience Acceptance at DocTrain East 2008.

If you’ve wanted to experience DITA but didn’t know where to start, then the DITA Users is a good place to start. DITA Users is an online community who connect with other users, share information, and provide provide peer support.  Set up by Bob Doyle, who also maintains multiple blogs and websites, his index lists the DITA blog and a DITA blog on the XML.org site amongst his many resources.

The community recognizes that users may need help ramping up to use DITA, and the benefits of membership certainly help users start off right, whether you choose between JoAnn Hackos’ Introduction to DITA or a license for an XML editor.

Members of DITA Users are automatically provided with a workspace folder where they can create and manage DITA projects - which include input files, build files, each with an action link to rebuild them, and output files - in a easy-to-use AJAX environment.  The XML editor is DITA Storm, which is a Web-based DITA editor embedded into the site. 

To join the DITA Users community, visit the website. You can also use DITA Storm free of charge, directly from the Immedius site.

Bob Doyle, founder of the CMS Review site, presents Leveraging the DITA Community: Advice, Tools and Resources To Get Your Tech Pubs Team Up-To-Speed at DocTrain East 2008.

The situation is all too familiar. An organization has a number of writers, distributed across multiple geographic locations, who are creating a pool of content, some of which needs to be shared and re-used. The content ranges from installation guides to user guides to service guides, and gets translated into multiple languages. With this much content to manage, there are bound to be inefficiencies. However, the larger the organization, the more havoc the inefficiencies can wreak, and the more expensive it can get.

It’s no surprise, then, that a company the size of Hewlett-Packard wanted to make their documentation processes more efficient and effective. Read how their Industry Standard Servers division reduced their word count by over 50%, raised their re-usable content to over 75%, and reduced their review cycle by 40% by implementing the Author-it component content management solution.

Author-it’s Kendra Carter presents two full days of workshops (Understanding Author-it Concepts, Building your Author-it Project, and Reuse and Conditionality in Author-it) at DocTrain East 2008.

In the progression from delivering documents on paper to delivering them electronically and on the Web, then as Help, then as a combination of various media, the concept of the “document” has changed from a contextual, linear chain of content to a modular, topic-based content bank that users can tap into, on demand, and pull out the answers they need.

The advantages of topic-based documentation have been extolled for a decade now, but in a Web 2.0 world, a new trend has emerged, that of including content from various sources. The idea is to direct users to up-to-date product information as well as provide ad hoc technical support, consulting, training, sales info, and other content, all in a single place.

The overall effect is to make users more successful, more quickly than by simply providing the standard documentation set. Nicky Bleiel, an information developer with Component One, has done just that, and documented the proposal process for an “Answer Station” that acts as an information portal, working with an existing corporate website, to provide a winning user experience.

Nicky shares her expertise in this area at DocTrain East 2008, with her session on All-Around User Assistance: Delivering Layers of Information Efficiently. 

One of the downfalls of implementing structured authoring is the perception that the process of creating structured content is onerous. Writers unaccustomed to structured authoring sometimes try to write off the process as cumbersome and slow. Without metrics, however, it’s hard to show the ultimate benefits of a structured authoring project.

Thanks to Scriptorium, there is a well-documented case study that shows some solid metrics for the benefit of automating documentation. Their challenge was to automate the documentation process for a client, to make the requirements documentation process as efficient as their technical documentation process. An additional challenge was to create these efficiencies by building on existing processes and using existing software. They rose to the challenge, creating a solution that built on a DITA implementation already in place.

To see how Scriptorium reduced a week-long process of rote formatting and clean-up tasks to a 15-minute, automated process, read the Solutions Brief on the Scriptorium site.

Scriptorium’s Simon Bate presents Comparing DITA Support in XMetaL and FrameMaker and Authoring and Publishing with XMetaL and DITA at DocTrain East 2008.

Component Content Management (CCM) technology allows enterprises to manage text content as “componentized” chunks of information rather than whole documents or web pages. It has become increasingly important to modern enterprises, especially given the rapid emergence of the DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) standard. However, CCM technology remains largely the domain of a wide collection of smaller software vendors targeting narrower use cases, according to research from CMS Watch, a vendor-independent analyst firm that evaluates content technologies.

These findings come from The XML & Component Content Management Report 2008, a groundbreaking evaluation of fourteen major CCM suppliers and five prominent XML Editor tools, based on extensive technology research and customer interviews. The 365-page report also documents industry best practices and common pitfalls to avoid when selecting and implementing a CCM system. Developed by CMS Watch and The Rockley Group, this report provides business critical background on the tools needed to effectively and efficiently deliver the right information to the right people at the right time in the right language and format.

Request a sample chapter. And, if you are interested in learning more about CCM, consider joining the Component Content Management group, moderated by Ann Rockley.

If you were to see her home office in the early evening, with rows of blinking green, yellow and blue lights and the multitude of screens casting an eerie glow (two laptops, a flat screen, a TV; all turned on), and the productivity gadgets connected to all of it, there would be no doubt in your mind. Here lives and works someone who doesn’t like wasting time. A “multi-tasker”, who can actually pull it off. Anyone who has had the pleasure of working with her knows that its not easy to keep up with this self-professed geek. On occasion, and only half in jest, she has attributed her high level of productivity to ADD high-functioning ADD, that is.

But there’s another explanation: passion. Rahel Anne Bailie is absolutely passionate about what she does which is why shes so good at it. As one of the leading content management strategists and usability experts in the Pacific Northwest, Rahel has developed a solid reputation as an innovative thinker, with a keen sense of business, and with the expertise and the network to get exceptional things done. Most recently, she chaired the very successful and critically acclaimed first annual Content Convergence and Integration conference, bringing together speakers and topics that are seldom connected. If your reputation is also shaped by the company you keep, well, lets just say Rahel keeps some excellent company. Don’t miss her presentation at DocTrain East, Content Convergence: Trends in the Creation, Production, and Maintenance of Technical Content. She’ll inform and inspire you, guaranteed.

Read Rahel’s blog. You can reach Rahel via email or via telephone at +1-604-837-0034. 

across Systems, a leading manufacturer of corporate translation management software, is offering its Personal Edition available for free download for freelance translation professionals. Personal Edition v3.5 was developed by across to offer full translation functionality particularly for freelance translators.

The across Personal Edition can be used either as a standalone application or as a remote client for direct access to across servers (crossWAN). For example, freelance translators always work with one single installation, irrespective of the current task and workflow.

When you register for your free Personal Edition, across takes you through a short, easy registration process that also adds your name and a brief resume of your qualifications to a pool of freelance translators. In this unique database, companies who already use across, but need translators, can easily find one.

across believes this allows for seamless processes, maximum transparency, and shared use of all resources.They also offer full support to freelancers through free on-line training (limit 2 in the course of six months) or their free (unlimited) interactive tutorials on “Project Management and Translating with across.” Tutorials are about 10 to 15 minutes long, so you can learn where and when it’s convenient for you.

While you are at it, you might want to check out the across library of white papers on Consistent Terminology, Translation-Oriented Authoring, or any number of other topics that could make the translation process easier for you and your clients.

across Systems is a Silver sponsor of DocTrain EAST 2007. The event takes place October 16-20, 2007.  Advancing your Career is the theme of the conference and is designed to help you improve the skills and expertise you’ll need to future-proof your career and improve your value as a professional technical communicator.

About across
across Systems is the manufacturer of the across Corporate Translation Management (CTM) software solution. Headquartered in Germany, across Systems is a spin-off of Nero AG, the provider of the world’s leading CD/DVD application.

The software includes a translation memory, a terminology system, and powerful project management and translation workflow monitoring tools. From project managers to translators and proofreaders, all involved parties work within a single system, either in-house or over a seamless connection to external language service providers. Open interfaces allow the smooth integration of third-party systems.