From the President

October 2017

Meredith Evans

Hooray for Spring! I’m finding it really hard to believe we are now in October. That means that not only is Christmas coming, but it’s time to write another report.

Board Happenings

One extremely windy Sunday in September we had our first in-person meeting in Wellington. You’ll be pleased to know that the food standard was high, with our lovely Secretary Jane Armstrong providing home-made chocolate chip cookies and lemon cake. It was great to have most of us meet up in person for a really productive meeting. Our newest and coolest Board member (and Rock Star) Shelly Davies was able to temporarily put her packing aside and join us remotely. Shelly was off to speak at the Plain conference in Austria! Hopefully we can convince Shelly to blog about her experience there, and also about her recent TED talk.

In other Board news, we are putting the final touches on a workshop programme for next year as well as starting some serious conference planning. Look out for some exciting updates over the next few months.

Events Schedule and Relaunch of the GDID

There’s plenty of great stuff left in the year. It’s great to see the Bay of Plenty Branch planning a meeting and it sounds like a good one! Christchurch as usual is all organised for the month, with an exciting announcement from ARA about the relaunch of the Information Design qualification. I know a lot of people have been eagerly waiting for this, and you’ll be pleased to know there’s been a heap of industry consultation and input from some of our most experienced technical communicators. More on this next month….

Dave Gash Workshop

Other events of interest this year include Dave Gash’s CSS workshops, held in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch. Dave is a great teacher and very entertaining. As both a techie and a technical communicator, Dave always does a great job of making his workshops highly relevant to our field.

As I’m sure these workshops will be very popular, I suggest you sign up quickly. Don’t forget that non-members can also attend our workshops, just for a higher fee, so feel free to share the details with your colleagues, friends, or family. Even better, get them to sign up to TechCommNZ to receive the reduced rate!

Wellington Branch

Now that our Wellington Branch Co-ordinator, Jane Armstrong, has taken over as Secretary, it would be so great if we could get a team of enthusiastic Wellingtonians together to help her coordinate this branch, and to run a few events. Please get in touch with me if you can help, or if you can offer some suggestions for events or speakers.

UX Conference

By the time you are reading this, a couple of our Christchurch members, Claire and Cindy, will have returned from UX 2017 where they are representing TechCommNZ with a booth, jet plane lollies, and a fun competition. Optimal Workshop, who are the key organisers and sponsors of the UX conference are TechCommNZ Business Partners, which means we have a mutual support arrangement. They make an awesome range of usability tools that can help you improve your content.

I went to the UX conference last year and thoroughly enjoyed it. If any of you attended, I hope you stopped by the TechCommNZ booth to catch up with Claire and Cindy and grab some lollies.

Thanks

So that’s all from me this month. Enjoy the sunshine!

Meredith