The Pulse of the Usability Community: Transformation and UUX

When you renew your STC membership, be sure to select STC Usability and User Experience (UUX) as one of your communities.

Bachmann, Karen L. Usability Interface (2005). Articles>Usability>Community Building>STC

Putting Our Hot Heads Together

The web is a conversation, but not always a productive one. Web discussions too often degenerate into whines, jabs, sour grapes, and one-upmanship. How can we transform discussion forums and comment sections from shooting ranges into arenas of collaboration?

Wood, Carolyn. List Apart, A (2008). Articles>Web Design>Community Building

Rechartering: Taking the Pulse of Your Community

Rechartering, as many of you know, means examining and refining your community’s purpose, mission, goals, and plan for delivering value to your members. Through the recommendations of STC’s regional directors and of the communities transformation committee, the board approached about thirty communities and asked them to participate in the pilot program. Twenty-four communities (eighteen professional chapters, three student chapters, and three SIGs) agreed to the experiment.

Oestreich, Linda L. Tieline (2005). Articles>TC>Community Building>STC

Relationships on the Web

What will be the key to web-site survival in 1996? My bet is the establishment of relationships between the site and its users.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1996). Design>Web Design>Community Building

Rethinking Community Collaboration Through a Dialogic Lens: Creativity, Democracy, and Diversity in Community Organizing    

Community collaboration has become an influential interorganizational phenomenon that provides innovative solutions for social problems. This critical case study uses dialogic theory to investigate how collaboration stakeholders negotiate creative and democratic outcomes. Findings demonstrate how a dialogic moment, although embedded in a homogenous partnership that facilitated discursive closure, constituted meaningful organizational change. The study empirically extends the theoretical claim that diversity resides in the communication situation and reveals that collaboration practices and stakeholder models are better understood when grounded in dialogic theory.

Guarrello, Renee. Management Communication Quarterly (2007). Articles>Collaboration>Community Building>Organizational Communication

Rethinking Your Newsletter  

This workshop gives you a structured way of thinking about your newsletter. We’ll go through the key questions you need to pose, both to yourself and to your colleagues. What goals do you have for the newsletter? Who is the audience? What personality do you want to project? What’s the name, and what’s in a name? Who will write the articles? Who will edit them? Who will design the newsletter? How will it be distributed? Which tasks will you do yourself; which will you delegate; how much time will it all take?

Grodsky, Susan J. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>Publishing>Community Building>Newsletters

Running a Chapter Employment Information Service  

This panel discussion summarizes various methods of distributing employment information to chapter members, including necessary equipment, advantages and disadvantages, and helpful hints for each method.

Masse, Roger E., Michael V. Sharp, and Jan D. Shelton. STC Proceedings (1995). Careers>TC>Community Building>STC

Running a Successful Job Bank  

To run a successful STC Employment Information Committee, you need methods for matching job seekers and employers. You need to obtain information on the qualifications of job seekers, find available jobs, and inform employers and job seekers. You also need to advertise your job bank. The job bank for the Lone Star Chapter provides examples of the methods.

Masse, Roger E. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Management>Community Building>STC

Slashdot and the Public Sphere  

Jurgen Habermas's theory of the public sphere provides a model of idealised democratic debate. Three major features of this model can be identified - universal access, rational debate, and a disregard for rank. This essay analyses the Slashdot model, and use it to examine Slashdot, a popular Web site, as an actualisation of public space.

Baoill, Andrew Ó. First Monday (2000). Articles>Technology>Community Building>Blogging

Social Intercourse: A Community-Based Design Initiative  

This paper introduces a model for operating in a socially relevant manner within a space that makes design an instigator of activity and response.

Abendroth, Lisa. University of Alberta (2000). Design>User Centered Design>Community Building

Social Media Is Changing Everything

When Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwarz needs to communicate with the world, he doesn’t necessarily call a press conference, issue a press release, or even convene a webinar or videoconference. He blogs. His online diary gives him an unfiltered channel leading to the employees, customers, analysts and resellers who represent the first wave of perception formation regarding important company products and service initiatives. Sun is leading a transformation of the communication profession, as the Web transitions from an information repository to a platform of collaboration and community building.

Gronstedt, Anders. Communication World Bulletin (2007). Articles>Web Design>Community Building>Social Networking

Social Networking for Business: Measuring the Results

The online world is abuzz with talk about social networking. With companies such as Facebook seemingly constantly in the news, 2007 has been the year that social networking took its first adolescent steps beyond being the sole purview of, well, adolescents, and started to become a tool that is getting noticed in the business world. But with all the hype out there about online social networking, how can organizations begin to better understand the tangible business impact of their forays into this area?

Carfi, Christopher. Communication World Bulletin (2007). Articles>Web Design>Community Building>Social Networking

Social Networks And Group Formation: Theoretical Concepts to Leverage

Understanding the formation, evolution and utilization of online social networks becomes important. While the Internet contributes to the information overload, it also provides useful tools to effectively manage ones social networks and through them gain access to the right pieces of information.

Singh, Shiv. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Articles>Web Design>Community Building>Social Networking

Social Web Application Design

Luke has made some great slides about Social Web Application Design, saying some very sensible things very well. I particularly like the 'System' diagram that shows how, when thinking about a simple photo, how it can be connected to other entities and related, aggregated and re-presented.

Smith, Tom. Other Blog, The (2006). Articles>Web Design>Community Building>User Centered Design

A Sounding Board for the Self: Virtual Community as Ideology    

Claims about the emergence of a new type of social aggregation--"virtual community"--cover a type of ideological discourse about social interactions. The main cultural resource fueling this ideology is the counterculture and its social project. Virtual community, both as a discursive and as a social practice, is a culmination rather than a resolution of the modern conflict between community and individuality. Presenting virtual community as a panacea for modern social tensions, especially that between individualistic and communitarian ideals, hides from sight not only some of the negative aspects of on-line social life (cliquish behavior and incivility) but also the role played by communication technology in fragmenting modern society.

Matei, Sorin Adam. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2005). Articles>Cyberculture>Community Building>Online

Stand Out from the Crowd

Enhance your competitive edge by highlighting the talents and skills that make you unique. Understand what sets you apart, learn to articulate this, and find ways to market yourself.

Hamer, Emma C. Hamer Associates. Careers>Collaboration>Community Building

Starting a Chapter-Level Special Interest Group  

STC's special interest groups (SIGs) provide a way for STC members to share their interest in particular areas of technical communication. Society SIGs at the international level may have hundreds of members, and many publish a newsletter, host an electronic newsgroup, and sponsor events and sessions at STC's annual conferences. Chapter SIGs usually have fewer members, but, because their members live in the same area, they can meet regularly and address members'local needs.

Taylor, Cheri W. Tieline (2000). Articles>TC>Community Building

Starting a User Group

I was having a hard time coming up with a program that would provide tangible member benefits and be easy to maintain at low (or no) cost. I finally found what I was looking for when a friend told me about a book review he was writing for O’Reilly, a technical publisher. When I asked how he got hooked up with O’Reilly, he filled me in on their user group program.

Wigser, Sarah. Tieline (2005). Articles>TC>Community Building

STC Chapter Handbook  

Running a volunteer organization is an opportunity to develop your leadership ability and your sense of professional community. When you complete your duties at the end of this year, you will have gained leadership skills that will benefit you in other areas of your life. This handbook was prepared by STC leaders with many years of experience running local chapters. Their experiences resulted in the wealth of tips, suggestions, and cautions that this document contains. As part of your planning for the year, STC strongly encourages you to take the time to review the entire handbook.

STC. Books>Documentation>Community Building>STC

STC Governance Forum  

A threaded discussion forum for issues of governance of the Society for Technical Communication.

STC (2007). Resources>TC>Community Building

STC Recognition Helps Build Community

The best benefit of my STC membership and leadership volunteerism is that the STC name recognition helped me get the jobs I wanted.

Byron, Barrie. MetroVoice (2003). Articles>TC>Community Building>STC

STC Transformation Project: Focus on Communities

I’m talking with you today because I was part of a three-person team that took the lead on thinking about communities for the STC Transformation Project. The two other members of that team were Fred Sampson and Whitney Quesenbery. Fred, Whitney, and I based our work on the goals and principles that the STC Board established for the Transformation Project. As we worked on the concepts for communities, we thought about how to apply these principles to meet the goals.

Redish, Janice C. 'Ginny'. STC East Bay (2004). Articles>TC>Community Building>STC

Strategic Plans: Focusing Chapter Energy

If your chapter has never created a strategic plan, or if it has been a long time since plans were updated, it's a good idea to develop one now. Those first plans can require one or two years to create, but don't be intimidated by the commitment. The phases of the plan are easily broken down into small, manageable sessions for which you can set reasonable or flexible completion dates.

Silvi, Deborah H. and Jamie H. Diamandopoulos. Tieline (2005). Articles>TC>Community Building>STC

Strength In Numbers: Forging Bonds with Nearby Communities

Although the economy in Northern California has improved, people are not clamoring to become technical communicators the way they were in the boom days of the late 1990s. Finding volunteers for chapter positions is difficult, and those who do volunteer often have to do more with less. An organization of local chapters can facilitate inter-chapter communication and sharing of resources.

Maki, Victoria J. Tieline (2005). Articles>TC>Community Building>STC