Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
April/May 2012
| Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter April/May 2012 |
The May meeting is on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, from 6:00 pm to 8:30 pm in downtown San Francisco at SFSU Extension, Room 608. SFSU Extension is located on the sixth floor of the Westfield San Francisco Centre on Market St, over the Powell St BART/MUNI Station. For details about the location and instructions for purchasing tickets, visit www.stc-sf.org/stc-meetings.htm.
Wikis: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
We’ve been hearing that wikis are the best way to distribute collaborative docs for about ten years now. Yet there are many roadblocks--editing tools are primitive, administration tools can be scarce to non-existent, and curation of wiki-authored content is rarely done. A panel of writers experienced with wikis and wiki-like tools will share their experiences and answer your questions.
Moderator: Mysti Berry, Principal Content Strategist, salesforce.com
Panelists:
Dee Elling, Principal Information Designer, AppDynamics. Dee specializes in social media trends and technologies, wikis, and a dozen other fascinating things (ask her about augmented reality!). She likes to embrace new communications technologies and apply them to software information problems. She recently gave a presentation about Mediawiki Help and Adobe AIR Help at Lavacon 2009. See http://www.deeelling.com/.
James Bisso, Lead Technical Writer, salesforce.com. Jim is co-author of Documenting APIs--Writing Developer Documentation for Java APIs and SDKs. After an illustrious career at Sun, Jim joined salesforce.com and now leads the internal documentation effort. He is painfully aware of the limitations of Google sites.
Mark Leonard, Staff Technical Writer, salesforce.com. Mark worked as a software engineer and lead technical writer at BlueRoads before joining the salesforce.com crew. He supports teams working in cutting edge technologies, and has adapted DITA/XML-oriented processes to creating content in GitHub, using Markdown syntax.
Eric Danielson is a document build engineer at Embarcadero Technologies. He speaks Python, PHP, JavaScript, Bash, and occasionally Ruby. He thinks the word "Impossible" has no place in the industry except following the words "We did the."