Summit ’14: An Interview with Keynote Speaker Jonathon Colman

Last month STC introduced Jonathon Colman (@jcolman) of Facebook as the keynote speaker for the 2014 STC Summit. His talk at the Summit is titled “Information Entropy: The Next 10,000 Years of Content Strategy” and promises to be a great kick-off for the conference. Your Friendly Neighborhood Blogger reached out to Jonathon to get to know a little more about him. See below for the brief interview.

Usually I ask our keynotes what they know of STC, but since you were a member in college I'm sure you're familiar with the Society. Instead I'll ask what you remember from your time as a member?

My days as a student of scientific and technical communication at Michigan Technological University are just a white blur to me now. Not because I was drinking, mind you—perish the thought!—but rather because it snowed so much in the remote upper peninsula of Michigan that all I can remember is a long, white blur that lasted four years.

But wait, it's all coming back to me now. The white blur fades and I recall a group of people helping each other out, learning from one another, sharing resources and tools, and collectively cursing whenever PageMaker or RoboHelp crashed. It was Michigan Tech’s student chapter of STC and it was where I found my community.

We helped each other learn the craft of technical communication, overcome hurdles and barriers, and develop empathy for the people struggling to understand complex systems, products, and processes. Those values of honesty, simplicity, innovation, and persistence continue to define technical communication for me.

Oh, and we drank. Please don’t tell on us.

What advice would you give to current students and new TC professionals?

Remember that one day, you're going to lead this field. You’ll be responsible for creating a vision and growing the discipline. And when all that happens, you'll be standing on the shoulders of all the giants who came before you.

But who are these giants? And what makes them so good at what they do?

Listed in order of importance, here’s my definitive list of the five greatest qualities of a master technical communicator (or “Jedi,” as some call them):

  1. They're assertively curious
  2. They have confidence with humility
  3. They're quick to laugh and slow to anger
  4. Aw, who am I kidding? They're over-caffeinated curmudgeons.
  5. See? Those bits about humility and being slow to anger come in handy.

Your bio says that you help “people and organizations build, find, and use the best stuff on the Web.” How do you combine these disciplines and how might others do the same?

If you take nothing else away from this, if you value your craft, if you aspire to create meaning and understanding and wisdom and gnosis, then know this core truth of our existence: with lots of coffee, anything is possible.

Ha, the real problem we need to overcome is that many organizations place artificial barriers and limitations in front of us. They say that we’re just wordsmiths and just documentation specialists and just UI copywriters.

But I don’t think that’s true. We create user experiences, too, which makes us designers. We structure and model information with standards like DITA, which makes us architects. We have a huge impact on search engine optimization—and not just with Google, but in on-site search, mobile apps, and intranets—which makes us marketers. And we help create meaningful change in our organizations so that they can achieve their missions and goals, which makes us strategists.

Technical communication is hard work. Very, very hard work. Never let anyone minimize your efforts or impact.

Your keynote speech is titled “Information Entropy: The Next 10,000 Years of Content Strategy.” Can you give us a techcomm-related prediction for 10,000 years from now?

I predict that we'll still be dealing with ambiguity in the future, just as we do now—it will continue to be a major aspect of how we live and work, the ways we grapple with meaning and complexity, the manners in which we build and maintain connections with one another.

So long as ambiguity plays a role in people's lives, there will always be a demand for technical communicators, information architects, UX designers, and content strategists.

As Abby Covert (recently elected president of the Information Architecture Institute) states: “We make the unclear, clear.” This timeless truth will describe the technical communicators of the year 12014 just as well as it describes us today in 2014.

Anything else you'd like to add?

Yeah: KNIBB HIGH FOOTBALL RULES!

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