From the President

November 2018

Image of Meredith Evans, wearing a cocktail dress at ITx 2018. She is smiling close-mouthed at the camera and looks very presidential.

Spring has well and truly arrived in Canterbury. Three days of 25+ temps with fierce Nor’ West winds, followed by Southerly storms, rain, and snow in the high country. It’s never boring here.

And it’s never boring on the TechCommNZ Board either. Read on for a bit of an update...

AGM

We held our AGM two months ago in Christchurch. Despite a small attendance it was a jolly occasion with some good discussions. I’d like to say a big welcome to our newest Board member Earnsy Liu.

Earnsy lives in the Bay of Plenty and has her own Technical Communication business. You might recognise her name from the fantastic, informative, and entertaining articles she writes for TechCommWire. We’re so lucky Earnsy is able to join our team.

ASTC Conference and Write the Docs

Student Outreach Coordinator and comms extraordinaire Katie Haggath recently hopped over to the Gold Coast to the attend the Australian Technical Communicators Association (ASTC) Conference. It sounds like she had a great time, learnt a lot, and did some fantastic networking. We’re hoping to build up more of a partnership with our Australian friends and also look at sharing resources like workshops, webinars, and conference presenters in the future.

Auckland-based Board member Abhay Chokshi is about to present at the Australian Write the Docs conference in Melbourne. I’m looking forward to hearing all about this next month. Write the Docs is an interesting organisation, with a real community focus.

Plain English Awards

The 2018 Plain English Awards are being held in Wellington on Thursday 15 November. While I was sad to see fewer entries this year in the Best Plain English Technical Communicator category (which we sponsor), I’m pleased to congratulate our own Katie Haggath on being a finalist in the Best Plain English Website — Private Sector category. Good luck Katie! And good luck to all other finalists. I can’t be there this year to support you in person, but I wish you all the best.

Salary Survey

Yes! It’s nearly Salary Survey time again. The annual salary survey runs between November and January, and we are again offering three $100 Prezzy cards as an incentive to complete the survey before the end of 2018. This survey is open to any Technical Communicator but you have to be a member of TechCommNZ to access the results data. See previous results here (you must be logged in).

Webinars

It was great to see heaps of people sign up for Rhonda Bracey’s webinar Increasing your efficiency with Microsoft Word. I’ve watched this a few times now and used some of the tips immediately. I consider myself pretty expert with Word, but still picked up a lot of great info (and reminders) from this webinar. Look out for more information soon on the 2019 workshop and webinar schedule.

And of course the conference. You’ll see we are looking to fill a few roles for this, in particular Sponsorship Coordinator. This is a great role for an organised person with a bit of time to spare. You can do it all from home, and mostly by email. So please get in touch with Kaye Churches if you can help out with this.

Other Random Stuff

Sadly I gave up on the bullet journal a few months back. Mainly because I finished my extra special blue journal and couldn’t quite feel the love for the new orange one. But I started using Microsoft To Do instead. If you haven’t tried this app, go check it out. I find it suits me very well.

As always, please flick me an email on anything TC related and I’ll do my best to help. I’d love any feedback you want to give on how I’m doing as President and what you’d like to see more (or less) of.

That’s all for me this month. Enjoy your Spring wherever you are, and make sure you do the Salary Survey when the link arrives in your inbox in the next few weeks!

Ka kite

Meredith