Upcoming Events

by Peter Szabo, Program Manager

Spring has sprung and the snow seems to be melting away just in time for a trip to Guelph for another General Meeting. This one has its very own corporate sponsor, Blount Canada, and should prove to be very interesting as Ben McCarl tells us how he has created a documentation Intranet at Blount.

In case you haven't considered it, why not come out to one of our STC chapter council meetings, and learn what goes on behind the scene, where your chapter council members donate their time and efforts to bring value to each member? Who knows? You may even be inspired to contribute your talents to this team of technical communicators, while learning even more skills that you can apply in your communication career. You can find details about the next council meeting below.

And we have two Webinars in April that are each free to all STC members. In one, Robert Barlow-Busch will discuss what the people who design, document, and build software applications or Web sites need to know about brand, while in the second seminar, Jean-luc Doumont will explore the magical number seven, plus or minus two, and how it relates to organizing your technical documentation to improve reader retention and usability.

Tuesday, April 5, 2005: General Meeting in GUELPH

Topic: Intranet Documentation - A Case Study

Time: 7:00 p.m., doors open 6:30 p.m.

Cost: FREE for all.

Location: Blount Canada Ltd. 505 Edinburgh Rd., N. Guelph, ON

Wednesday, April 6, 2005: STC Remote Seminar

Topic: Building Brand into Your Product or Web Site

Host: Robert Barlow-Busch

Discover how brand can complement our work and help us to be more successful--both at delivering great products and at getting our voices heard in the organization.

Time: 1:00-2:30 p.m. (Doors open at 12:30)

Location: CheckFree i-Solutions, 455 Phillip Street, Waterloo [455 Phillip Street, Waterloo].

Cost: FREE for members and $35 for non-members.

Tuesday, April 19, 2005: Council Meeting

Time: 6:30-8:30 p.m.

Location: CheckFree i-Solutions, 455 Phillip Street, Waterloo

All members welcome — help your chapter by becoming a volunteer!

RSVP to Opal Gamble.

Wednesday, April 20, 2005: STC Remote Seminar

Topic: Magical Numbers

Host: Jean-luc Doumont

The magical number seven, plus or minus two, was made famous when George Miller, in his 1956 article, denoted it as the number of information chunks a person could hold in short-term memory. The seminar first exposes the seven-plus-or-minus-two myth by interpreting the number correctly as an asymptotical limit, per Miller's paper. It then proposes other rules of thumb that prove more useful in practice, based on the numbers zero through six, and illustrates these concepts with numerous examples.

Time: 1:00-2:30 p.m. (Doors open at 12:30)

Location: CheckFree i-Solutions, 455 Phillip Street, Waterloo [455 Phillip Street, Waterloo].

Cost: FREE for members and $35 for non-members.

Tuesday, May 3, 2005: General Meeting

Topic: Cooking the Books—A Practical Guide to Documentation Design

Tim Grantham draws on two decades experience designing, writing, editing, and publishing just about every kind of technical document there is, to get you up to speed on the kinds of information you need to provide for almost any product. He defines the six basic classes of products and their associated documentation sets—what information those document sets include, how they are structured, and who has to use them—and drills down to take a closer look at designs for two types of document: the software developer's guide and the hardware service manual.

Time: 7:00 p.m., doors open 6:30 p.m.

Cost: FREE for all.

Location: University of Waterloo (U of W), Davis Centre, Room TBD

If you have any questions about upcoming chapter events, or if you have a suggestion for a meeting topic, feel free to e-mail Peter Szabo (Program Manager).

For details about our chapter's events for the rest of the year, as well as last minute updates or additions to the schedule, be sure to check our local STC chapter calendar.

About Peter Szabo

Peter has been a technical writer in one form or another for ten years. For the past five years, Peter has worked for CheckFree i-Solutions, a software firm in Waterloo, and is currently the Manager of Technical Publications.

Born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, Peter moved to Guelph in 1997, where he currently lives with his wife, Irene, and six-year-old son, Taylor. He is working on his first feature-length screenplay.