Michelle Cherian
President – India chapter for 2010

Michelle:

As a member of the Community Achievement Award Evaluation Committee, it is my honor to inform you that the STC India Community has earned the Community of Merit award for 2010. The citation on your certificate will read:

“For your active and enthusiastic efforts in providing opportunities for professional development with your Annual Conference, regional conferences, and Career Day”

Your community will be recognized during the Leadership Day event on Sunday, May 15, at the summit in Sacramento. At that time you will receive the CAA certificate. If you are not able to attend personally, designate an STC India member to accept the certificate on behalf of the community. Please notify Steve Skojec (steve.skojec@stc.org) in the STC office who will be representing India at Leadership Day.

As one of the most consistent and active communities in the CAA process, your community had another year filled with many activities. The CAAEC hopes that your community will continue to aspire to a high level with a set of impressive initiatives and activities next year.

The attached document contains comments about your winning entry.

Congratulations to all members of the STC India Community.

Karen Lane, Member
Community Achievement Award Evaluation Committee (CAAEC)

Hello all,
I am pleased to announce that STC India Chapter and Instructional Designers Community of India (IDCI) http://idc-india.ning.com/ has decided to work together to provide learning professionals/Instructional Designers in India a forum for learning and to help them connect with one another, collaborate and learn from one another.

Here it is how the collaboration is going to work:
* IDCI will get speakers for the ID sessions and workshops. STC India will help them with the location and infrastructure etc. The collaboration comes into effect from the March STC India Learning sessions to be held at Novell, Bangalore.
* STC India would arrange the WebEx sessions for IDCI.

We are also exploring various other areas for the improvement of ID learning in India. Stay tuned for the updates.

Thanks & Regards,
Rajdeep
On behalf of the STC India Admin Council

TWB Launches India’s 1st Center of Excellence in Technical Communication™ and demonstrates up to 80 percent cost saving with automated information flow and managed content cycles.

The Writers Block (TWB) has launched India’s 1st Centre of Excellence (COE) in Technical Communication™. The TWB Centre of Excellence in Technical Communication™ (TWB COE) is a lab like set up managed by a team of country’s most diverse and accomplished Technical Communicators and is equipped to demonstrate and apply technical communication tools, technologies, knowledge and trends to live business environments.

The TWB Centre of Excellence in Technical Communication™ (TWB COE) will allow enterprise customers to experience and evaluate – for the first time in India – competing and complementing information management architectures, content management systems, technologies related to developing and disseminating content and different software tools. Also for the first time ever, enterprise customers can see how could they measure and manage ‘quality of content’ and implementation. TWB Consulting and research teams have proved managing quality of content and automation of information flow can save enterprises up to 80 percent cost.

At the TWB Centre of Excellence in Technical Communication™ (TWB COE) enterprise customers can experience:

• How to run a more efficient enterprise by having information available where required, when required, without duplication of effort
• How could they help make their organization and customers make more efficient business decisions
• Information and content management architectures melding disparate technologies & tools; management quality of information flow and content.
• How could they save up to 80 percent across the enterprise in automating information flow and creating and maintaining content.

Housed in the TWB Complex in Bangalore, the COE powers indigenous innovation and practical implementation of technical communication solutions for large and diverse organizations, especially organizational decision making process is multi-layered. At the TWB Centre of Excellence in Technical Communication™ (TWB COE) enterprise customers can run simulations and pilots on:

• Best / most suitable/competing architecture(s) of implementing information management & content reuse throughout the enterprise
• Approaches on quantifying and measuring information and information quality
• Various documentation and information management software solutions such as:

> Microsoft®, Author-it®, Madcap® , Adobe® suites, multiple CMS’ and LMS’
>  XML/DITA implementations

• Pilots on how each of these can be adapted to various enterprise requirements

According to Gartner, due to lack of information, processes, and tools, through 2012, more than 35 percent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets. An Aberdeen Group research says that reuse has helped to reduce review times by subject matter experts by 40 percent, freeing these resources to focus on new product development, rather than supporting the documentation process.

About TWB

The Writers Block (TWB) is Asia’s leading technical communication and publishing services provider and caters to the needs of technology and process driven industries. TWB provides world-class technical communication outsourcing, training and publishing services to companies globally. TWB’s expertise spans industries that include IT, technology Products & Outsourcing, ITES, Financial, Aerospace, Defense, Ship Building, Manufacturing and Discrete & Process Industries. TWB offers a complete suite of services that allows its customers to effectively publish the technical knowledge and caters to over 60 large clients globally. More information on TWB is available on www.twb.in.

The Writers Block
The TWB Building No: 4062
19th Main Road, HAL 2nd Stage
Bangalore – 560008 India.
Landmark: Behind Carlton Towers.

Media Contacts:

Samantha Ann Conquest / Nidhi Agarwal

Mobile: +91.9945041426 / 9810105861

Email: connect@twb.in

Regards, Dr. Annapoorna Ravichander
Director-Training| The Writers Block |

Hi all,

If you are an STC member and not a part of the stcindiamembers group, please mail me at secretary@stc-india.org with your membership ID. I will add your email address to the group.

Thanks,

Swaminathan

Dear STC India,
My co-editor, Gerald Savage, and I are soliciting story proposals for our upcoming collection Negotiating International and Cross-Cultural Technical Communication: Stories of Technical Communicators. We believe members of the STC India can be extremely valuable contributors to this collection and hope to send the call for contributors your way. Is there anyway that we can announce the details of this call on your website or through a listserv? Many thanks!

Best,
Han hyu1@ksu.edu
Han Yu, PhD
Assistant Professor
Technical Writing & Professional Communication
English Department
Kansas State University
130, E/CS Building
Manhattan, KS 66506

Hi all,

Visit the following link to view the results:

http://notebook.stc.org/2010-election/

We believe that the STC India portal was hacked recently and there were a couple of downtimes since the last weekend. While the downtime on Saturday (3rd April) lasted about 45 minutes, yesterday’s downtime prolonged to about 20 hours. As today was a working day for most of us, we could not reduce the downtime by resolving the issue sooner.

We regret any inconvenience that may have caused the users.

Hi All!

The recently conducted STC India competition attracted favorable responses from the technical writing fraternity, and much to our delight, it initiated the momentum for the 12th Annual STC India Conference scheduled to happen in our capital city of New Delhi. We invited entries for the background image of the conference portal a few weeks ago, and received quite a few interesting and beautiful design-based themes. We knew that we had a tough task in hand in judging the right entries, and you proved us right!
Our judges for this competition: Promila Chitkara and Sridhar Machani were elated to see the brilliance of the entries and unanimously arrived at a winner. Though we have a single winner for the competition, our judges felt that it would be incorrect to sideline the other design entries. Hence, they have decided to use all the competition designs’ entries in some form or the other for the conference portal. Congratulations to all of you and thank you judges!

Right, so the winner of the background image for the 12th Annual Conference portal is Vikrant Rai for the design tited Delhification. Vikrant has brought out through the design the importance of technical communication, and how the 12th Annual Conference of STC India in Delhi provides the necessary impetus of technical communication and writers across the North who for the first time gets a chance to host the STC conference. STC India expects to silence the critics who have always accused annual conferences to be south confined. Congratulations Vikrant! You win an IPOD NANO! We will send out an email to you shortly. Keep an eye on your door for the package. J

Thank you everyone for being a part of the competition, and keep watching this space for more updates on the 12th STC India Annual Conference.

Best wishes
Rajdeep
Admin Council
http://stc-india.org
Join the FREE STC India mailing list http://groups.google.com/group/stcindia

For more information on the Diane Feldman Scholarship program, please see the STC Technical Editing Web site: http://www.stc-techedit.org/Scholarship.