Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
October/November 2009
| Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter October/November 2009 |
The October meeting is on Wednesday, October 21, 2009, from 6:00 pm to 8:30 pm at the Elephant & Castle in San Francisco's financial district. For details about the location and instructions for purchasing tickets, visit www.stc-sf.org/stc-meetings.htm.
This is an interactive session. Attendees are arranged in workgroups and engage in short, practical, fun case-studies at three points in the session. We gather attendees’ documentation review experiences, identify where time and efficiency are lost, and provide tips and tricks for improving communication between team members. We present practical methods and tools that significantly improve the documentation review process. We show how we implemented these principles in the LiveTechDocs application, applying them to XML technical documentation.
Fabrice Talbot is the CEO and co-founder of SF based LiveTechDocs. Fabrice had been designing CMS systems and XML technologies solutions for many years when his wife, Teresa Mulvihill, technical writer and LiveTechDocs co-founder, reported a need for tools to share and review documentation with business users efficiently. As a result, time, effort, and money was lost, which created negative feedback even though the project team was doing a great job. Fabrice began the development of LiveTechDocs in early 2007 to solve these very issues. Since then, Fabrice and Teresa have pursued their vision to make documentation review simple, fast, and accessible for everyone involved.
Jeff Boudier is the Community Manager at LiveTechDocs. Jeff is a specialist of web 2.0 technologies and human science methodologies. He thinks technology should be a facilitator, an enabler rather than an end. When joining the LiveTechDocs adventure in 2008, he saw the collaborative documentation review platform as exactly that: a tool for people to make their jobs easier and more enjoyable. He believes in the positive impact of structured collaboration and communication in the work environment in general, and in particular in technical documentation. He manages the LiveTechDocs Community, a place for documentation professionals to share and learn about all things technical writing and single sourcing.