Highlights of Your Council’s Planning Session

by Debbie Kerr, President

On Tuesday, August 22, the new council for 2006-2007 met for the first time to plan the new STC year. To even have a planning meeting, we needed a location. Fortunately, Leanne Rollins was able to get permission for us to use a meeting room at Equitrac for this and future council meetings. Thank you Leanne and Equitrac!

The meeting began at 6:30 and ended at 8:30 pm.

Attendees: Laura Zinn (Newsletter Copy Editor), Margie Yundt (Newsletter Editor), Ruth Haworth (Competition Manager), Leanne Rollins (Competition Committee), Lori Jankowski (Treasurer), Debbie Kerr (President), Sarah-Beth Doner (UW Student Liaison), Pauline Horn (Student Awards Manager), Karen Pogue (Membership Manager).

Regrets: Carol Lawless (Recorder), Fei Min Lorente (Volunteer Manager), Marisa Latin (Employment Manager), Paul Kostiuk (Email Manager), Stephanie Knoke (Webmaster).

Chapter-level Goals

Transformation, rechartering

The words “transformation” and “rechartering” keep showing up in emails from the STC. Speaking as the president (yes, this is Debbie writing), I don’t know if it just me getting those emails, but I thought I’d better do something about them to see if they would stop. I am looking for more information, and once I find it, will work with the council to start documenting processes and procedures that the council performs. This will formalize our processes, and ensure everyone understands what we do and why we are doing it, which can’t be a bad thing. Can it? Time will tell.

Reaching Distance Audiences

While our meetings are usually in Waterloo or Guelph, we do recognize that we are the Southwestern Ontario Chapter STC, and so discussed possible ways of making meetings available to audiences who are further away. We wondered if we could connect with other universities and colleges like Western, Windsor, Brock, McMaster, and the community colleges. We wondered if we could set up a pod cast of some kind so that we could communicate with a wider range of people. We are still doing research, but your feedback would be appreciated. Is this something that interests you? Let us know!

Portfolio-level goals for portfolios without managers

Program

The plan is to have general meetings in September, November, February, April, and June. This will complement when the newsletter is issued so that we will have contact with our members each month.

In September, we are having a progression meeting about Employment (for details, see the Editor's column). April will be our annual Wine and Cheese networking event, and June will be our year-end barbecue.

We are still working out the details for our other meetings. If you have any ideas about topics that you would like covered or you know of a great speaker, we would love to hear from you.

Education

Web Seminars

These will continue, and will be selected based on speaker and topic — not just on having one each month. We will make an effort to have them in the months when there is no general meeting, but it really depends on the topics available. Assistance with hosting and managing these events is always welcome.

Education Seminars

We plan to have education seminars again this year. We are looking for very special speakers this year — one or more speakers who are outside the usual names that come up. If you have suggestions on topics or speakers that you would like to see, send them to education@stc-soc.org. If you want to help in way with the organization of this event, then we would like to hear from you.

Public Relations

To help increase the visibility of our chapter, and the STC in general, we would like to get involved in career and job fairs. If you know of upcoming events or events where you think we could "get the word out" about the STC, then send me an email, and we will add to the agenda for our next council meeting. If you have some time yourself to help with our public relation efforts, we would like to hear from you too.

Portfolio-level goals for portfolios with managers in attendance

Competition

The general information about the competition has been submitted to Head Office so that it will appear on www.stc.org. Plans are being discussed as to how the training day for judges can be done more effectively. Why wait for an invitation, why not email competition@stc-soc.org now if you are interested in being a judge?

Student Awards

In an effort to attract more submissions for our student awards competition, we are opening the competition to the University of Western Ontario. We are also looking into ways to simplify and clarify the submission process, for example:

• automate the process with online forms
• post samples from some previous winners to give students an idea of what we are looking for as "technical communication"
• provide a list of what is "acceptable" communication, and maybe expand that to include multimedia
• provide instructions on how to obtain transcripts of marks
• expand on what is required in the cover letter.

The Quill

The number of issues of the newsletter will be fewer this year, with issues going out in October, December, March, May and August. This issue is a sort of "lite" version, which we pulled together to let you know about the change in the number of meetings and newsletters. We also needed this issue to let you know about the change to our first general meeting, which is on the third Tuesday of September, September 19.

Other Portfolios

Other portfolio managers were either not at the meeting or had nothing to report at this time. That doesn’t mean that they have nothing to do. I know for a fact that things change quickly.

For example, since the planning session, Ursula McCloy has agreed to be the Hospitality Manager, Marisa Latin, our Employment Manager, has been emailing me with various requests, so I know she is active. Stephanie Knoke, our webmaster, is on vacation, and sending me messages from her BlackBerry, asking me what needs to be done on the website.

I don’t know if this is some kind of curse for not attending the planning session, but don’t let the absence of notes about a portfolio make you think that nothing is happening. It just means that nothing was reported; it does not mean there is no activity.

Anyway, Margie was at the meeting, and she is getting a lot of activity out of me. (Look at how many articles have my name on it). I am writing this after midnight, because Margie said she wanted it Friday night, so technically I am a little late. Hopefully being president carries some weight, and Margie is asleep and won’t notice that this email came in after midnight.

Editor's Note: What? And risk my volunteer job ;)

Next meeting:

Want to get more involved? Join us at our next council meeting on Tuesday, September 12th at Equitrac (450 Philip St in Waterloo). Pizza is served at 6:30pm sharp!

About Debbie Kerr

In the 20 years that Debbie has been writing documentation, she has worked in a variety of industries: government, retail, software, and insurance. She is currently employed at The Economical Insurance Group in Waterloo, where she has stepped out of her traditional role of writing user guides and help files, and now writes a variety of specifications.

Debbie has been a member of the STC since 1994 and has been a council member for many years. For the second year in a row, Debbie has bravely taken on the role of Chapter President.