In this episode, Ellis discusses the importance of networking and meeting other technical communicators, especially for those who work solo or in small teams. He explores various avenues for connecting with industry peers, from conferences and meetups to virtual groups and informal gatherings.
Key topics discussed:
- Challenges of solo technical communicators
- Conferences & meetups
- Navigating networking for introverts
- Write The Docs London event recap
- Alternative Networking Ideas
- Tips for speaking at meetups
- Final thoughts
Transcript
This is the Cherryleaf podcast. Hello again. My name is Ellis Pratt and I’m one of the directors at Cherryleaf. I’d like to start by thanking those of you who commented on social media sites and elsewhere about our last episode, which was called From User Docs to Podcast. It’s great when we get feedback and when we hear that so many of you liked a particular episode.
In this episode, we’re going to talk about meeting and connecting with other technical communicators.
In a lot of companies, particularly in the United Kingdom, Technical authors, that’s what we call technical writers or technical communicators in the UK, often work alone. They’re just one person within an organisation. Or perhaps it’s a small team of maybe two or three. They don’t have many opportunities to share our ideas and to talk to other technical communicators.
One approach is to go to the conferences like the TCUK conference or the tekom conference in Germany and see some of the presentations. And between the breaks and at lunchtimes and in the evenings, meet other people who are doing this job.
Another approach is to go to a networking event or what’s called a meetup. And the good news is that there are two events to meet ups that happen in London. So if you’re based in or around the southeast of the UK, then that’s an opportunity for you to go and meet other people. One is hosted by the ISTC. That’s the professional body for technical communicators in the UK and they run roughly monthly events that are held at the cafe, I suppose, or the seating area, of the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank, close to Waterloo station.
The other group that hosts meetups is the Write The Doc London group. Write The Docs is an online forum that is particularly aimed at developers of developer type documentation. They tend to call themselves documentarians. And Write The Docs themselves run conferences in Portland Oregon and in the Czech Republic each year. Post COVID, some of these have been actually virtual events.
And two people, Paulina and Elisa, have decided to revive the London meetups, and they’ve been arranging monthly gatherings. A meetup has a different vibe and feel to a conference. They tend to be hosted by a company, usually at their offices. They tend to be arranged on a weekday after work, typically starting at something like 6:30 or 7:00.
And the format usually is that there’s a start time and people that get there around the scheduled start time have an opportunity to meet the others at the event and chat with them. And that session is usually then followed by a presentation, typically about 30 or 40 minutes long, where somebody stands up and talks about a particular topic.
Then there’s a break. And many organisations provide food and drink. It’s often things like pizzas and cold drinks. And then after that break there’s another presentation. So it can be Part 2 of the first presentation or a separate presenter. And that often again, is about 30 to 40 minutes. And after that second presentation, there’s again an opportunity to talk and chat to the people at the event.
So overall, the session can last about two or 2 1/2 hours. So there’s time for people to get home at a reasonable hour.
So why should you go to an event when the alternative is getting home to a nice warm cosy sofa? I think events are really useful. They’re opportunity to learn from others. There’s presentations by people, and often they’re talking about things they’ve discovered, things they’ve done or talking about. Case studies and war stories. They don’t tend to be sales pitches, more presentations by technical communicators for technical communicators.
And when you’re talking to other people, it’s an opportunity to make friends or acquaintances, to understand what they’re up to, just to see how you’re getting on in your life, in your career compared to others.
Now it can be daunting sometimes to go to network events, particularly if you’re by nature an introvert. So it’s handy to know a couple of things to ask to break the ice when you’re talking to people. Things like what prompted them to come to this particular event, what things are they currently working on, who do they know at the event.
And what you might see is people swapping details with each other, so that they can continue the conversation or see the posts that people are making on LinkedIn. And one of the features within the LinkedIn app on smartphones is it can generate a barcode. And you can scan that bar code and it automatically connects you with that person on LinkedIn. So it’s very easy. And you tend to see that more than people swapping business cards these days.
Because COVID closed down so many things and many groups stopped doing face to face activities, for some people it can be quite strange or quite difficult to be in a large group, in the evening, networking in these ways. And there can be a temptation to be quiet or to just ask lots and lots of questions, almost like it’s an interrogation. So I would say if you are unfamiliar out of practice with talking to people at these types of events, ask questions and also acknowledge what people say. And empathise with them. Start a conversation. It’s two ways.
The most recent event that I attended was the Write The Docs London event that was hosted by Neo4j at their offices near Southwark Tube station in London. And there were two presentations from people at Neo4j. One was by David Oliver, and he talked about building a docs team and talking about how the Neo4j documentation team has grown over recent years. And how they started by looking at how they could hire new people, start to document the new features that had been added to the product, start to deal with the backlog of issues, and then start to do things that weren’t being asked for but would add value to the documentation.
They could start to create a strategy or road map of how they could improve things like improve the search on the documentation site and start to build things like internal dashboards where they could manage and monitor the performance of the documentation.
And the second presentation was by Mark Woulfe and that was on dashboards and how Neo4j have developed dashboard or markers developed dashboards to analyse the documentation. Mark showed the dashboard that he has developed at Neo4j he created. It uses Google Analytics, Google Looker Studio and some other applications to present visually information like the top view pages and the changes to those pages over time, some analysis on why did some pages grow in popularity. And that might be because there was a product launch. There might have been a blog post about a particular product. There was an improvement to the documentation page. There might have been some training that led to people using the content of the documentation more.
Mark said that on the pages they have a thumbs up and thumbs down icon for users to give feedback on particular documentation pages. And in addition to that, there is a field where if somebody submits positive information, they also need to explain why they think this content was useful. And the same for negative content. By asking people in both situations, both positive and negative, to apply, they get a more balanced understanding of what is good and bad about their documentation.
They also have statistics on the page, visits by countries, and also the source for the visits .Did it come from Google search or from another website. Interestingly, having developed this dashboard for the tech pubs team, other departments have now asked Mark if he could develop dashboards for their content.
What I find when I attend events like this is ideas spring up. You’ll see a presentation and you’ll wonder, could they have also done this in addition to that? And typically, there’s a question and answer session at the end. Then you can ask them, did you consider doing this or not? It may be the case that they did consider it, but it wasn’t practical. There are limitations and that could be handy to know.
David and Mark’s presentation led me to do some experimenting with ChatGPT and GPTS or GPTS I should say. Where we could get them to analyse repositories in GitHub and GitLab and provide reports on things like the number of changes to documentation and the nature and categories of the types of changes that have been made to documentation.
This obviously relates to organisations where they have their documentation in a repository on a platform like GitHub or GitLab. And these GPTs generated some interesting results that could be some useful time savers in doing things like generating project reports and also things like release notes, connected to new updates to documentation or change logs.
And in fact, we’ve recorded these as proof of concepts and demonstrations and included them in our e-learning course on using generative AI in technical communication.
The Write The Docs London and the ISTC London events are both great if you live within commuting distance of London. But what do you do if you live elsewhere? What if there aren’t any meetups in your area? Well, one thing you could do is organise one. It obviously helps if you can get somebody else to partner with you to do the work of organising and hosting an event. One of the best ways to get something done is to be the initiator. It does help if you are arranging events like this if there is a venue that you can use. It might be that you start off as a virtual group, perhaps as a group on the Write The Docs forum for a particular location, or connected to the STC or another professional body. Or a group that is on LinkedIn.
How to build up a community and get dialogue going that way. And you could host events using Teams or Zoom. Unfortunately, if you do do that, it can be quite tricky on those platforms just to have social chitchat. It tends to be everybody talking at the same time, rather than breakout sessions. And these events do need enthusiasm, and it’s great that there are enthusiastic organisers in London such as Paulina and Elisa.
Another alternative are what are called netwalks, where you arrange to meet people in a park or in the countryside, and you walk together. And what you can do is you can speed up or slow down and talk to different people within that group. These tend to be done during the day when there’s sunshine or at the weekend, so they can be difficult for people who have commitments at home.
You could arrange what the Germans call a Stammtisch, which is essentially a meeting around a table that can be in a pub or a restaurant. That can work, but you are limited in that it’s very tricky to have a stand up presentation of any length in that type of environment, unless you hire a private room. And then you’ve got the issue of the cost of the room.
And failing all of that, one of the things you can do is have what are called 1-2-1s, meet people individually to have a chat over a tea or a coffee or even a glass of wine or beer.
Iin addition to the obvious places to meet like a pub or coffee shop, there are also some interesting venues in cities like London. Places like the British Museum, the Tate Modern, the Tate Gallery have member’s rooms. So you can become a member of these museums, and there is an area where you can meet people in quiet and you also have the opportunity to walk around the museum, talk to people, show them the exhibitions.
At the same time, there are private members clubs and there are also buildings that are for the professional bodies, like the institution of Electronics and Technology or the Royal Society of Arts. And technical communicators typically can become members of those types of organisations. They tend to have the right qualifications for that.
The best types of meetups have a presentation, they have a speaker. So in addition to turning up, in addition to hosting events, another thing you might want to do is actually volunteer to be one of the speakers at the events that are going on. In fact, I’m speaking at the next Write the Docs London event, which will be on using AI in technical communication.
Speaking at a meetup is different from speaking at a conference. At a conference there is typically a stage, so you’re higher. There are loudspeakers and microphones. There’s a big projection screen. And typically, there are tight time limits, because after you there’s often another speaker. At a meetup, you’re typically talking to a smaller group, perhaps 10 to 50 people. The host tends to provide the projector, so there is a way of having slides and projecting them. But because you’re not on a stage, and often the projector is slightly smaller than the big one on a conference. And because you’re at the same level as a projector, you do need to be careful you don’t stand in front of your slides and block the information that’s contained on them. You also need to be careful that you don’t end up talking to the projector or talking sideways rather than facing your audience.
At meetups some presenters don’t use any audio visuals at all. They tend just to talk from memory or talk from a few notes, or use a flip chart. And just write some information on the flip chart. Or they’ve already prepared some information and they roll the pages back and over, where appropriate in the presentation.
You might need to speak a little bit louder. A bit like being a teacher in a classroom. Because there’s not usually a microphone or amplification. And if you’ve got anything playing out of the speakers on your laptop when you’re presenting, you’ll need to remember to bring something like a Bluetooth speaker so that everyone can hear what is playing.
Time limits can be a little bit more flexible at events like this, so there’s less of a problem if you run over or that there can be difficulties on starting on time. So you can lose at one end and gain at the other end.
And if you’ve never spoken at an event and you want to give it a go, it’s a good starting place. It’s good to remember that the audience wants you to succeed, that there to have a good time, and you don’t need to be an expert that can answer everything and anything.
You’re there with peers, you’re there to share what you’ve learnt, and it’s a journey. You’ve learned some information, but not necessarily everything. You don’t need to have a controversial opinion on some. Everything. You don’t have to be that total expert, but tell people what you’ve learned, or explain what happened with a particular project. People are always interested in stories.
If you want to know more about speaking at conferences, we have done a podcast episode on that topic. So meetups are a great way of physically meeting your peers other technical communicators, learning and sharing ideas with people. And if you are in or near London, have a look on the Meetup website for the events that are scheduled for the group. And it may be the case that we can say hello to each other face to face at that event.
So thank you for listening. If you want to know more information about Cherryleaf’s technical writing services and our training courses, then you’ll find that at the Cherryleaf website www.cherryleaf.com. And you can catch me on a number of social sites, including LinkedIn, or if you search for my name Ellis Pratt, you should come across me. And apart from that, again, thank you for listening. Until the next time.
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