Are you in the Society for Technical Communication? Then you know it is now election time. Candidates for the Society offices have been announced, and this is probably the strongest field we’ve seen in a while. It will be a tough, close race for all the contested positions. . A while ago - ok, a LONG while ago - I wrote a piece called “Your Voice Matters” and it is still true (except for the part about mailing in ballots). Please, if you belong to STC, take the time to make an informed decision and participate. The candidates we elect will be responsible for carrying STC into the future, we need to take that seriously and VOTE!

You’ll find all the info you need, including candidate info and Q&As, as well as a link to the ballots, on the STC election site.

If you belong to any of the STC communities, you should participate in their elections, too! The time frame is a bit different, so your community slate may not have been announced yet. If not, contact your community leaders, and see how you can help! You never know when your skills and talents might be the exact thing that your community needs.

As I have been talking about for a while now, I submitted proposals to the big South by Southwest Interactive and Film Festivals (www.sxsw.com) scheduled for next March in Austin, TX. South by Southwest organizers put all proposals up on a site called the Panel Picker, and allow the general public to vote for (or against) them. The results of this voting becomes 30% of the score that determines whose proposals are selected. Selected proposers get free admittance to both Festivals.

I’d really appreciate it if you would vote for my proposals! You can look at all proposed sessions by going to http://panelpicker.sxsw.com and searching by name or topic or whatever, or you can go directly to my session pages with these links:

(Interactive) “Potterize it! Sharing the Magic of Fan Culture” I would be moderator to this panel of people who have built huge communities around the Harry Potter books/movies. The most recent conference they put on had over 3200 attendees!

(Interactive) “Co-Authoring without Homicide” This was submitted by me and a writer friend of mine with whom I’ve co-authored several projects.

(Film) “More than MySpace: Social Media for Filmmakers” This is a panel with some really interesting actors and actresses.

In order to vote, you have to register and log in. It’s quick and free, and they won’t bombard you with spam email – this is just to prevent autobots from voting. It’s a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down kind of thing.

Voting ends this September 2nd at midnight Austin time.

Yesterday, a terribly troubled and damaged young man committed an act of unfathomable hatred here in Tucson by shooting 18 people at what was otherwise a peaceful gathering.

Today, there are still victims fighting for their lives, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, the primary target of the attack. Today, six families are mourning their loved ones.

Tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, we will try to make sense of this tragedy. There are people in Tucson, in Arizona, and at the Federal level who will be working to figure out just what happened and why, and I sincerely wish them rapid and complete success.

We can not undo what has been done. I’m just one person with little influence, but I can not sit around and do nothing. I CAN make an appointment to give blood to refill the Red Cross blood bank. I can renew my own medical training so I’d know what to do in this sort of crisis. I can speak out against violence and violent rhetoric when I see it. I can donate to organizations that work to identify and help the mentally ill. I can be here to do whatever it takes to support my friends who so suddenly and tragically lost their mother/grandmother, and I can make sure to take the time to let all my friends and family know just how much I love and appreciate them. Because as we’ve just been reminded, you just never know what tomorrow may bring.

I truly believe that we in the Tech Comm field have spent way too much time and effort talking to ourselves. Don’t get me wrong - I LOVE the STC Annual Summit, where the point is to network with other tech comm professionals. But if we want to grow as a profession, if we want to expand our influence, we need to get out to the events for people who NEED tech comm professionals. Like South by Southwest (SXSW)!

SXSW started as a music festival in Austin, TX, and eventually grew big enough to split into three separate events (Music, Film, and Interactive). The SXSW Interactive Festival alone drew about 14,000 people last year, and it was a blast! I’ve written before about the innovative things I’ve seen at these events, but the topic today is the Panel Picker. The Panel Picker is an online listing of ALL the proposals submitted to all the SXSW festivals for next March in Austin Texas. Each proposal gets a page where people can vote (a simple thumbs up or thumbs down) on which sessions look good, and also can comment on the sessions. Anyone can vote (it requires a quick and free registration to the site) and the popular voting results make up about 30% of the score that determines who gets to be a SXSW panelist. As of today, the South by Southwest (SXSW) Panel Picker 2011 is open for voting!

Since each person was limited this year to only one proposal per festival, there are”only” 2347 panels in the Panel Picker. Luckily, you can sort them by category and search by keyword or submitter name or company. In even better news, we’re starting to see lots of my STC colleagues submitting panel ideas! PLEASE take a few minutes to check them out, comment as necessary, and give them a big thumbs up! Links go directly to the individual panel pages; you must be registered and signed in if you want to vote or leave a comment.

First up is my own session (well, it is my blog, after all!):
Brenda Huettner, “Communicating with Everyone: Improving Accessibility of Information Products”

Here’s some sessions I know will be GREAT - if I missed any, send me a note and I’ll update the list!

Karen Bachmann, “Usability requirements: Translating user research into successful products”
Rahel Bailie, “Stop Fiddling on the Roof: Good Riddance, Tradition”
Dana Chisnell, “Voting: The 233-Year-Old Design Problem”
Richard Hamilton, “XML, POD, and Wikis for Small Publishers”
John Hedtke, “Co-authoring Without Homicide”
Larry Kunz, “Your New Life as a Content Curator”
JUST ADDED Alexander Robinson and Vanessa WilburnDocs are Not Band-Aids for Poor Design
Jared Spool, “Anatomy of a Design Decision”

Finally, remember I said it was one proposal PER FESTIVAL? Well, though I’m not an actor myself, I do have actor friends who are willing to be on a panel with me as part of the SXSW Film Festival. If you’re in a voting kind of mood, feel free to check out

Brenda Huettner, “Beyond MySpace: Building Buzz Across Multiple Social Media”

VOTING ENDS August 27th - that’s only 2 weeks away! Don’t put it off, vote now!

It looks like I’m only doing one conference this Fall, but it’s a good one! Lavacon 2.0: The Conference on Digital Media and Content Strategies will be in San Diego this year from September 29th to October 2nd. I’ll be giving a talk called “From Nothing to YouTube in 60 Minutes or Less: Software Training Using Adobe Captivate” - it should be a lot of fun! And the speaker list is phenomenal, I’m going to have a tough time choosing which sessions to attend.

In addition to the new name, Director Jack Molisani is implementing a bunch of interesting new features:

–A “wall” (similar to Facebook) right on the lavacon site where people can leave comments for others to see. So far, it’s all glowing testimonials from speakers and attendees of prior LavaCons, but I bet if new or potential attendees wanted to post questions, they’d be answered promptly and honestly.

–Each of the almost 60 sessions has a community page where anyone can rate the topic, contact the speaker, or leave comments. There are also links for sharing on Facebook and tweeting on Twitter. Check it out, leave comments (and if you want, you could leave me a 5-star rating!)

–Lavacon Live lets you see who is talking about Lavacon right now, with a map of visitor traffic. People are literally logging in from all over the world!

–Speakers can offer discounts to their friends (and followers). This is a great way to encourage attendance and to track which speakers draw more attendees. To get $50 off your registration fee, use code BHUTTNER when signing up. And of course, the earlier you sign up, the better - rates go up quite a bit after August 31st.

–A new location! This conference has traditionally been held either in Hawaii or New Orleans, but this year’s venue is the Omni Hotel, Gaslight District, San Diego. The Omni Hotel has just been ranked highest among 15 upscale hotel brands by J.D. Power and Associates, so I’m really looking forward to a great stay.

I call myself a writer, and most of the time, that’s what I do. I started this blog (almost five years ago!) specifically as a place to store things I’ve written. The last few months, though, have been crazy-busy, and while that’s good news for my resume and for my bank account, it hasn’t been so good for my blog. So here’s a compilation of things that make the writer in me smile:

One way to encourage yourself to write is to just sit down and crank out the words without worrying about typos or grammar or editing. 750words.com gives you place to do just that - it is strictly a scratch pad word counter (plus a tiny bit of incentive with stuff like a “wall of fame” for those of you write every day for a month). I signed up July 1st, but haven’t made it to 750 words on the site for the whole month yet, much less 750 on any given day.

Another fun project is Nanowrimo - or “National Novel Writing Month”. The idea here is that you start on November 1st and finish a 50,000-word novel by the end of the month, logging in every day to clock word-counts. Notice that like 750 words, they’re not looking at content or quality, just inspiring you to crank the thing out. This one also has tons of local groups who get together during the month to support and encourage each other.

I also get a kick out of “The First Line” where, as you might guess, they give you the first line of a story and you have to write the rest. Any genre, anywhere between 300 and 3,000 words. This is one I actually accomplished once!

Which are YOUR favorites?

I went to a friend’s wedding in North Carolina last week. Well, actually it was his DAUGHTER’S wedding, but that makes me feel very old. We got to spend a couple of days at Carolina Beach, which was also nice. I have a ton of pictures, but only posted a few over at my Facebook album. If I’ve done it right, the album should be open for anyone to see!

Actually, that should be Phoenix Comicon (one “c”, all one word) but however you spell it, it was an amazing event! It was at the Phoenix Convention Center for the first time (instead of Mesa, as in prior years) and moved to Memorial Day weekend instead of January. Because of these two things (and some super-active PR folk), there were about 14,000 attendees. This sounds like it would be starting to big enough to lose that “intimate” feel of smaller events, but that really wasn’t the case.

The exhibit hall, of course, was huge, and there were a few rooms large enough to count the audience in the 1000s, but most of the programming was in smaller rooms, allowing everyone to feel up close. It was probably a good thing that they had so many tracks to divide up the audience. My personal favorites were the scifi and film/tv tracks, where I got to attend a writing workshop with Michael Stackpole, listen to the science advisors for some of my favorite shows, and OF COURSE, see Wil Wheaton and John Scalzi. I didn’t do much with the comics, costuming, gaming, or horror tracks, though I did get to listen to some new bands. I learned a lot about anime because I was volunteering to help with that track, and I got to meet several indy movie directors and actors.

My favorite session was Wil Wheaton and John Scalzi talking about the unicorn pegasus kitten painting. Really, you have to see it to believe it.

I also got to chat with some Star Wars fans in the 501st Battalion - they’re a costuming group that also does charity work. And I went to the “geek prom” where I had the extreme pleasure of introducing my daughter to Wil Wheaton. He was, as always, pleasant and gracious! Oh, and I got to play Rock Band - quite a bit, actually! Pretending to be in a band together is a fun way to meet people.

I was having so much fun, I never did get around to taking very many pictures, but if you want a feeling for what it was like, you can always check out the Flickr stream.

I attended the IA Summit in Phoenix last month. I was kind of nervous about it, because I didn’t know whether I’d know anyone or not. Though there is TONS of cross-over between the theories, processes, and goals of strict IA (or UX or whatever initials you want to use) and the more traditional area of technical communication, there isn’t always cross-over in membership. I’ve attended some 18 STC annual events, where I feel fairly confident that I will always find a friend (or two or 200) to hang out with. For the IA Summit, however, I was not so sure.

But it was only a few hours drive from home, and I needed to be at another meeting near there anyway. To top it all off, DAN ROAM was scheduled to speak! I’ve been a fan of his since I first read “Back of the Napkin” and really wanted to see him in person. So I decided to head on up!

Pre-conference info was good, and the organization (in this case, ASIS&T) had set up a Crowdvine site. Through this, attendees could post questions or comments, arrange side field trips, or just see what was happening as preparations progressed. One speaker (Whitney Hess) even used it to poll the potential audience while creating her presentation!

Like at STC events, I did hear some grumbling. Some of it was even the EXACT SAME grumbling in both places: “we need a better name to call ourselves”, “how can we prove ROI and get more $$?” “the group is too big/small/focused/chaotic/passive”. Some didn’t like the implementation of the Crowdvine; others complained there were too many sessions in each time block (um, there were only 4!); and there were some people who were quite offended by the opening keynote. But there were lots of positive things too! The sessions I attended (especially Dan Roam’s) were very good, and either showed me a new way of looking at things or showed me entirely new things. For example, I had never heard of “body storming” before - it’s a very physical type of brain storming. And I really enjoyed the sessions that focused on visual things like sketching and presentation skills. You can see the whole program at the IA Summit site.

There was also a space dedicated to whatever might come up last minute. Sometimes it was overflow/repeat of a popular session. Sometimes it was a discussion that started elsewhere and needed to continue. I sat in on the “how to improve this conference for next year” session. It was actually quite positive, with lots of concrete suggestions and even a couple of volunteers who stepped forward to help!

One final thing I found very interesting (and fun): Saturday was “game night”. The organizers provided a room with several large tables, and attendees brought along games like “Apples to Apples” and “Fluxx”. I happened to have my Bananagrams with me, so we played some of that too! It was a lot of fun.

Will *I* go to IA Summit12? Hard to say right now. Like everyone else, a lot has to do with funding, and since the next event is in Colorado and will require more expensive travel arrangements, I’ll need to see where I am at that time. But if I do go, I won’t worry about finding friends, because the IA Summit attendees, like STC members, feel like “my” kind of people!

Not to restate the obvious, but SXSWi was a blast! For those who don’t know or haven’t been, I’m talking about the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival, held a few weeks ago in Austin, TX. I joined 15,000 other people to talk about things like publishing, visual thinking, content strategy, accessibility, and more. I stayed in a condo right on 6th street with 3 friends (fun AND economical) and stayed for the full 5 days. But I can’t even begin to count the number of cool, fun things that happened and people I met and (most importantly) new I ideas that I learned about.

There are really four parts to SXSWi - the official programming, the exhibition hall, the sponsored social events and lounges, and the in-between networking opportunities.

Programming is the set of sessions selected from the Panel Picker, an interactive online proposal processing system that lets everyone vote on which sessions get to be presented. The public voting, however only counts for about a third of the decision on who gets in. In general, this system worked really well. There were around 15 or 20 concurrent sessions in each time block (except for keynotes), and the ones I saw were great. My two favorites were Dan Roam (@danroam) on Visual Thinking and Robert Hoekman (@rhjr) on getting a book published. There was only one session I wanted to attend but couldn’t because of overcrowding. I’m really looking forward to the video and audio recaps and reviews on the SXSW site!

The exhibition hall was huge, with literally hundreds of vendors and other types of booths. Some surprised me at first, but then I realized it was the exhibition hall for BOTH the interactive and film festivals. For example, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) was there, and the Film Offices from Montana and Florida and Georgia, and tv stations like C-SPAN. Even these were interesting, though - did you know that C-SPAN has 160,000 hours of programming available online for FREE? I’m still not sure exactly why the National Guard had a booth, but they did give me a cool USB stick.

There were hardware booths like Panasonic and Samsung and Sony, and software biggies like Microsoft and Opera. AOL was showing off their new Livestream feature, which includes a geolocation function, and Paypal was pushing a new set of APIs. I particularly enjoyed the publishing booths (like O’Reilly and New Riders) and the ones from magazines (both digital and paper). One new one I’ll be watching is called MyTekLife, and it turns out to be based here in Arizona!

Sponsored events were more than just the parties that lasted all night (really)!! One of my favorites was the blogger’s lounge sponsored by Cliqset and Windows Phone. This is where I had the most interesting conversations, met the people who work in closely related fields to my own, and felt the most welcome and comfortable. I also happened to be there when Tony Hsieh came through with Advanced Reader’s Copies of his new book “Delivering Happiness” for everyone in the room! It certainly made ME happy, and I’ll be posting a review of it soon…

The evening parties varied from hits to misses. It’s tough to get the right balance between enough people to make it interesting and not so many people that you can’t hear yourself think. But they were all definitely worth the visits! My two favorite events were the techkaraoke (fun theme, plus a large back room that was quiet enough to talk) and the Fray Cafe.

Fray Cafe isn’t really a party (we had to pay for our own drinks and everything), it’s more of a show where people get up on stage and tell stories. There are only three rules: it has to be about you, it has to be true, and it has to be under 10 minutes. Sadly, a lot of people went way over the 10-minute limit. When combined with the shorter-than-usual overall time block, this meant that a long list of people who signed up just didn’t have time to tell their stories. I hope next year we get to hear more! Among those who DID get their turn were my friends John (@johnhedtke) and Phylise (@phylisebanner). I was extra glad because I’d sort of encouraged them to come with me. And I was mightily impressed at both of their stories!

All of this was wonderful, and would have made the event worthwhile, but even more valuable to me were the opportunities I had to meet actual, real-life people between sessions, between events, and sometimes just while standing around. Sometimes they were people I’d only “met” electronically, like Alexandra Samuel (@awsamuel), or hadn’t seen in person in a while, like Kathy Jacobs (@callkathy) or the inimitable Molly Holschlag (@mollydotcom), but mostly they were new to me. And my favorite part of ALL was when I got the privilege of introducing people to each other, particularly when they discovered projects they could work on together.

So, it was an exhausting week (the condo was right above a bar, so we HAD to stay up until 2am), but also amazing, inspiring, and totally worth it.