Our annual party features a catered buffet dinner, great companionship with fellow communicators, and valuable door prizes. As in previous years, we will announce the  northern California Technical Communication Competition, Touchstone, winners and display the winning entries throughout the evening. These winners exhibit the best in technical communication. Continue reading →

Voice assistants have become household names as smart speaker adoption rates have skyrocketed over just a few short years. What has made voice so popular? And what should technical communicators know about this new area of technology?

Continue reading →

Description

Are you looking for a job in the field of technical communication? Or considering some change in your tech comm career? You need to attend the fifth annual STC Berkeley job fair. You can talk to recruiters, join in short discussions about career-related topics, and get expert advice about improving your resume. And you can network with other people in the field at the Job Fair.

This year we have moved the Job Fair from Wednesday evening to Saturday afternoon, and extended the time, to make it more convenient for people to attend.

Participants

Recruiters from Synergistech and TEKsystems.

Resume advice from Joy Montgomery, author of a book about resume-building.

Progression-style discussions:

• Open-source projects as an entry into technical writing. Gale Naylor, documentation engineer at Facebook.
• Going independent: legal considerations. Lindsay Spiller, attorney.
• Preparing for an interview. Dyana King, career and business coach.*
• Tech writers and medical writing. Rose Tomey, medical/technical writer and communicator.

* Dyana King asks that anyone who plans to join her progression discussion take the four-minute assessment at www.mindtime.com anytime before the progression begins. You will get much more out of the discussion if you do.

Time and Place

Saturday, September 29, 2018. Doors open at 11:00 a.m., close at 5:00 p.m.  Recruiters will begin interviewing at noon. Progression discussions 1:00 to 2:00.

The location is the Ed Roberts Campus, 3075 Adeline Street, Berkeley. You can take public transit: the campus is adjacent to the Ashby BART station. The job fair will be just off the main lobby.

Admission

$10 reserved online (click below) or $15 at the door.

If you don’t wish to use PayPal, you can reserve a place by sending email to reservations@stc-berkeley.org. We’ll collect the reserved-in-advance price from you (cash or check) at the door.

Cryptocurrencies are an emerging, unregulated, digital asset that many people are looking to as a new form of money. Blockchain is the technology that supports cryptocurrencies, the “rails” they run on. The world of blockchain and crypto has its own jargon, a growing technology infrastructure, and even some political philosophy behind it.

Continue reading →

A California election offered a natural experiment in user interface design—an open Senate seat that would be on the ballot statewide. Ballot designs must adhere to legal, technical, and financial constraints, but there is still room for variation. California’s 58 counties came up with 58 different designs. Nancy Frishberg was part of a group that analyzed the results after the election. They evaluated whether any of the discretionary graphic treatments and county-specific wording achieved better results or fewer errors. Did wording, layout or other graphic design elements lead to more accurate voting (fewer disqualified ballots)?

Continue reading →