Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
December 2004/January 2005
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Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter December 2004/January 2005 |
On December 15th we will hold our fifth Holiday Party and our final gathering at the London Wine Bar, where we have been meeting since at least early 1996. We plan to go out with a pleasant evening of enjoying the open beverage service (yes, that includes wine), talking with old friends, and making a few new contacts. I hope you can make it. Perhaps you'll even win a door prize, thanks once again to the hard work of volunteer Keith Albert.
On January 19, we will hold our first meeting at the Elephant & Castle. The topic should be a good one, with Joe Welenski on "Trends, Tools, and Technologies in Software User Assistance." Joe knows what he's talking about. He's the head of WritersUA (formerly known as WinWriters), which is holding its thirteenth annual conference in Las Vegas March 20-23.
But I think the star of the evening (sorry, Joe) will be our new venue:
The Elephant and Castle
424 Clay Street
San Francisco
People keep asking me: "What's it like?" Well, the E&C is a bar. When a group of chapter leaders took a field trip to check it out before our August meeting, we were greeted at the front door by a couple of young women who offered us free T-shirts and coupons to sample vodka at the bar (though this is apparently not a normal occurrence).
Being all business, of course, we declined (well, I admit, I took a T-shirt) and went on downstairs (accessible by elevator) to see the meeting room. Unlike our current meeting location, it is not a wine cellar. It is much like any other meeting room you may have seen at a conference in a hotel. (It is actually part of the Club Headquarters Hotel.) So, the romantic atmosphere will be lacking, but we will be able to hear and see the presentations more easily, we will still have hors d'oeuvres (though it will be pub grub rather than LWB eclectic), and you will still be able to buy a drink at the bar upstairs. I hope to see you there (and downstairs at the meeting, too).
Here's an announcement for you students out there. Through its National Scholarship, the STC awards $1,000 scholarships to undergraduate and graduate students who are pursuing established degree programs in some area of technical communication. The deadline is February 15. For more information, see www.stc.org/scholarshipInfo_national.asp.
This is the time of year when we form a committee to nominate officers to run our chapter from July 2005 through June of 2006. If you would like to join our leadership group as an officer, a manager, or a team member or if you would like to nominate someone else, please let me know.
Our leadership team keeps our chapter's programs and services active. We volunteer because we enjoy it and because it's good for our professional development: we learn new skills, improve our resumes, eat pizza, network, and so on. But we're always looking for new helpers, and we can't all keep doing this forever.
Right now, we are looking for people to join our web team. If you are interested in volunteering, send me an email at info@stc-sf.org.
Copyright © 2004 by the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter (www.stc-sf.org). This article may be reprinted in another STC publication under the provisions of the chapter's copyright policy.