STC's Online Information SIG: A Good Choice

30 July 05

SIG membership paying-off already… good stuff ahead!

In my last article I mentioned the difficulty I was having with finding my niche in the Society for Technical Communication (STC), and was considering the change from chapter enrollment to Special Interest Group (SIG) enrollment only. I still haven’t made a complete switch, but already the SIG focus is proving to be a good direction for me.

Here’s the scoop: In the recent past I contacted the Online Information SIG (OI-SIG) Manager, Ann Wiley, and offered to provide some design services for the OI-SIG Web site. I initially proposed the idea of migrating the current OI-SIG site to a more collaborative publishing environment, and provided a few details about how that might proceed.

My timing was pretty good; it happened to be the case that STC officials had been considering such things on a broader scale. The STC recently formed a Leadership Community Resource (LCR), which has a technology committee filled by managers from each of the different SIGs. After a few email exchanges with Ann about the subject of the OI-SIG Web site, she invited me to be a member of the OI-SIG Web Experts Team and help her serve on the LCR’s technology committee; I accepted, as has Lou Quillio, another OI-SIG member and Web publishing expert (and a fellow TextDriver as well).

My commitment as a member of this committee will be to…

  • help monitor communications from the total group on an email list: topics addressed by the total group—people, process, and technology;
  • participate in a limited number of phone conferences with other technology committee members;
  • perhaps do some assignments (to be determined);
  • and routinely publish Web design and Web publishing information for OI-SIG members.

The main goal of our Web Experts Team right now is to get a dynamic site operating for the OI-SIG site, and create an environment in which SIG members can easily use and manage the colloraborative system. The whole process may also serve as a model for other SIGs.

This project will be very interesting, should provide plenty of opportunity to publish articles for OI-SIG members, and will be a great way for me to interact with STC.