Archive for October, 2006

(press release)
Rochester Women’s Network will host its 11th Annual Business Conference, “Powering the Economy through Leadership and Innovation: Discovering What You Have That the Regional Economy Needs” on Friday, November 3rd at the Rochester Riverside Convention Center from 7:30 am to 5:00 pm. Details and registration are available at the RWN web site or by calling 585.271.4182.

The conference will focus on where the regional economy is headed and how to prepare for and take advantage of emerging business and career opportunities.

• Keynote speaker Gay Gilbert, Administrator for the United States Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration’s Office of Workforce Development and point person for the WIRED Finger Lakes Partnership – a Federal initiative to help stimulate the regional economy – will discuss what the USDOL envisions for our region and provide the framework for the day.
• Maggie Brooks, Monroe County Executive, will offer her perspective on the opportunities that the WIRED initiative brings to our community during the plenary session.
• Robert Duffy, Mayor of the City of Rochester, will wrap-up the day and share his thoughts on putting the ideas generated during
  the Conference to work.

Choose three sessions from Concurrent Workshops that offer something for everyone in the business arena, from business owners to senior managers and executives as well as individuals seeking to advance their careers. Topics include:

• Winning Strategies to Hire, Retain and Motivate the Best and Brightest
• Getting the Job You Want: How to Evaluate, Market and Enhance Your Skills
• Starting and/or Growing a Business in a Challenging Economy
• All About Industry Clusters: Becoming Successful with the Company You Keep
• Making a Flat World Work for You: Embracing Tomorrow’s Technology Today
• Flexible Workforce: A Creative Approach
• Social Entrepreneurship: The Triple Bottom Line
• Building an Education Bridge to Your Future
• Hot Jobs in a Cool Economy
• Smart Customer Service Drives Business Success
• The Power of Networking

Conference admission also includes the RWN Up & Coming Businesswomen’s Awards Luncheon recognizing 15 women on the “fast track” who have demonstrated professional and career leadership potential. [Editor's Note: Amy Castronova, president of Novatech and STC-Rochester Chapter VP, is one of the honorees.] The luncheon program will feature remarks by Germaine Knapp, President of Sojourner House and recipient of RWN’s 2006 “W” Award. Wrap up the day at the WIRED networking wine and cheese reception. Planned breaks throughout the day offer ample time to visit the Exhibitors’ Marketplace which features products and services geared toward professionals, as well as time to network with one another.

Brochure and registration form

Register online or call 585.271.4182 for more nformation.

Special thanks to RWN Business Conference sponsors!

• Presenting Sponsor: Preferred Care
• Supporting Sponsors: Rochester Woman Magazine; MIKAREN Interactive, Video and Design; Democrat and Chronicle; Rochester Institute of Technology, E. Philip Saunders College of Business; My Digital Office; WIRED, Finger Lakes Partnership; Constellation Brands; Davie, Kaplan, Chapman and Braverman, P.C.; ESL Federal Credit Union; Paychex; Advantage Professionals; The Summit Federal Credit Union

Sincerely,
Deborah Stendardi, Conference Chairperson & Mary Peters,
Executive Director Rochester Women’s Network
—————————————————————–
email: rwn@rwn.org
phone: 585.271.4182
web: http://www.rwn.org

Every year, the Society for Technical Information awards scholarships to four students who are preparing for careers in some area of technical communication. The $1500 awards are given to two undergraduates and two graduate students to help with school tuition and expenses for accredited degree programs.

This year, one of the awards went to Heidi Trost of Henrietta, NY. A graduate of Nazareth College, Ms. Trost plans to pursue advanced studies at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT.)

The STC International Scholarship Committee awarded the scholarship to Ms. Trost based on her outstanding academic record, the high quality of her technical documentation and graphic design projects, and her potential for contributing to the rapidly changing technical communication profession.

Since 1971, STC has awarded these annual scholarships to improve the transfer of technical information through such occupations as technical writing and editing, graphical design, interface design, and Web design. For more information on the STC International Scholarship Program, visit the STC Web site.

The Society for Technical Communication (STC), the world’s largest association for technical communicators, has announced its support for World Usability Day, Tuesday, November 14, 2006. This event is organized by the Usability Professionals’ Association, which is sponsoring a series of events that promote the values and benefits of usability engineering and user-centered design. All events will take place over a 36-hour period. Individuals and organizations in more than 30 countries around the world are participating.

As part of World Usability Day, STC and CM Pros, an organization of content management professionals, are organizing a global online card-sort exercise. Card sorting is a fast, cheap, reliable technique way to determine how people categorize information. This knowledge helps information architects and usability professionals create structures for print and online information that make products and technologies more usable. STC’s card-sort exercise will be carried out by participants living and working all over the world, and is expected to provide insights about regional variations in the ways people organize information.

“STC’s involvement in World Usability Day is a logical extension of technical communication,” says Paula Berger, president of STC. “Everything that technical communicators do is about usability, whether making instructions more usable through better writing, interfaces more usable because of better labeling and navigation, or products more usable because of user testing. It’s all part of the same continuum.”

It is not necessary to be a member of one of the sponsoring organizations in order to join in the exercise. Anyone interested in participating can sign up at http://www.stc.org/wud. The exercise is made possible by the donation of WebSort software (http://www.websort.net) from Parallax, LLC.

Part 1: DITA & Translation
Tues, October 24, 2006
10am PST | 1pm EST | 6pm GMT

Presenters: Dr. Joanne Hackos and Jennifer Linton, Comtech Services

The first in a series of free educational Webinars, “DITA and Translation” will focus on how to best implement DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) in your information development and management process.

As organizations build a business case for moving their content to DITA and implementing a content management system, reduced translation and localization costs are usually significant parts of the promised ROI. Translation costs are reduced through the virtual elimination of desktop-publishing tasks for multiple languages, as well as the limitation of new and changed topics vis-à-vis a comprehensive multi-language management system.

In this, the first webinar of the series, Dr. JoAnn Hackos, president of Comtech Services, director of the CIDM, and chair of the DITA Technical Subcommittee on Translation, will outline how to best implement DITA to reduce translation costs and speed time to market of global content.

Takeaways from the “DITA and Translation” Webinar:

• How to use DITA metadata to specify languages, bi-directionality and translation.
• How to prepare indexes in DITA that do not complicate translation activities.
• How to prepare your legacy translation memory so that you maintain its value as a business asset as you transform content to the DITA model.
• How to write with translation in mind.

And more!

The rest of the series:

• Part 2: Conditional Publishing
  Mon, November 20, 2006
  10am PST | 1pm EST | 6pm GMT
• Part 3: Specialization
  Thurs, January 18, 2007
  10am PST | 1pm EST | 6pm GMT

Register for this webinar or for the entire series.