From the President

March 2018

Meredith Evans

Welcome to this, my short and sweet President's report for March. A huge thanks to wonderful Katie Haggath, who does a superb job of putting together TechCommWire each month, and chasing all the contributors down to get their reports in on time.

This month, in the spirit of Plain Language, I'll attempt to write this report using what I've learned from Shelly's excellent webinar series. Feel free to send your feedback and criticisms to president@techcommnz.com.

Here goes...

Hi all!

I hope you've had a lovely month. While the weather's been amazing, I'm a bit over the heat now... but I'm sure in a couple of months' time I'll regret saying that!

I'd really like you to take the time to read this report, and the rest of this awesome newsletter, and enjoy it. Or send me some feedback if there's things you'd like to change.

There's lots of great stuff to read, and our organisation offers a lot of great opportunities and value to our members. But it's important that we know what you want, and what you think we could change. So why not tell us? Even better, you could offer to help out. Even writing an article or book/webinar/workshop/course review would be fantastic, or better yet, offer to host a branch event.

What's been happening lately?

We had a Board meeting

  • Our Board met on Sunday 25 February, in Christchurch.
  • Emma provided some fantastic plum loaf and Laksa, while I contributed a decadent mint slice (thank you Chelsea Winter for the recipe).
  • We did some work too.
  • Most importantly, we were able to firm up some details and dates for the ITx conference in July. I'd love to be able to announce our speakers and the date of our conference stream, and of course the price, but sadly I don't have that info...yet. In the meantime, check out the website ( https://itx.nz/) to see info on the date, venue, and conference streams.

We had a webinar series

  • We recently wrapped up the Shelly Davies Plain Language webinar series.
  • What a great experience! I really enjoyed the series and picked up a lot of tips.
  • We've received some really good feedback too. Huge thanks to Shelly for running this for TechCommNZ.

We are planning some events

  • On Wednesday (!), I’ll be speaking at the Christchurch Branch event about “Real users and What to do about them”. This will be a condensed and maybe updated version of my conference talk from last year. There will be wine, so it’ll be ok.
  • Next month, Shelly presents a webinar called Māori Cultural Competency for technical communicators.
  • In June, we’ll be hearing from Sarah Maclean, who’ll teach us about Accessibility for the web and print.

We finalised the Salary Survey

  • Steve Moss did an amazing job of analysing the Salary Survey results and summarising them in his report.
  • If you’re a TechCommNZ member you’ll be able to access the data and do your own interpretation.
  • If anyone feels like writing an article on the results or on trends, let me know!

I learnt some stuff

  • I’ve been reading up on User Experience (UX) and Design Thinking. It’s really interesting and I see a lot of relevance to technical communication.
  • I’ve attempted to articulate my random thoughts and ideas about this subject into an article, which you’ll be able to read in the next Southern Communicator (date TBA).

I kept up with my bullet journal

  • So far, I’ve done two months of it, and I’m enjoying it a lot.
  • If I make it to May, I’ll consider it a habit.

Catch you next time!

Ka Kite

Meredith