I spent the last two days at the Technical Communications UK 2009 Conference, organised by the ISTC, and held in Derby at the Mickleover Court Hotel. The hotel deserves a special mention because despite only becoming the venue for the conference at very short notice it managed to provide excellent facilities in all respects. The event was very well attended, and attracted massive support from commercial vendors and the speakers at all the sessions I attended were of a very high calibre. (I can’t comment on my own session, of course!)

You can tell how a conference is going by looking at the faces of the organising committee. You can usually see the stress in every taut furrow of their brow. This week, Paul Ballard and his colleagues on the conference organising committee were smiling all the time, as everything went according to plan (the new plan that is, drawn up when the original venue hotel reneged on its contract!). In fact the only time I saw organising committee member Rachel Potts looking anything less than perfectly happy was when she was contemplating the prospect of being interviewed by BBC Radio Derby. (You can hear Rachel here, at about the 50 minute mark as long as the recording is still available on the BBC i-Player.)

“Conversation” emerged as a major theme of the conference. Various speakers touched on aspects of new media and social media as ways of breaking down conventional barriers between writers and readers. My own presentation was about the importance of talking to users, and was largely very similar to the presentation I gave in Vienna in June, but also included interim data from my 2009 User Documentation Survey which is ongoing. You can download the slides from my presentation (3.5MB PDF).

In his closing keynote address to TCUK09 yesterday, RJ Jacquez of Adobe pointed out that Technical Communicators are well placed to lead the way in engaging with customers – many of us are already involved in social media through our own blogs and our own Twitter and Facebook accounts, and most of us are genuinely interested in knowing what our customers think of the documentation we prepare, how they use it, and how we can make it even better.

Several speakers referred to Anne Gentle’s recently published book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation which examines how this sort of conversation can enhance the work technical communicators do, not only because we need to learn about them when we prepare technical publications, but because there is so much that we can learn from them, if we are ready to listen to what they say.

I will be publishing more of my thoughts on TCUK09 in the coming days.