Welcome to Roundtable

Roundtable is a new,
exciting educational content
subscription offering from STC.

About STC Roundtable

Roundtable is a new, exciting educational content subscription offering from STC. It is separate from membership and provides additional ongoing professional development in the form of fresh, high-quality content for 48 weeks on topics relevant to technical communicators and curated by well-known experts.

Roundtable offers subscribers value, with over $1,500 of fresh, high-quality content, including weekly webinars, published white papers, practical applications, live Q&As, expert panel discussions, and more

Knowledge & Expertise

Access to top experts in the field

Cutting Edge

Timely, relevant topics in the world of tech comm and its tangential industries

Community

An engaged community of peers
Week 01.
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Webinar

A formal webinar led by the monthly curator or a selected expert. Content may consist of a presentation, exploration of a specific scenario, and/or exploration of additional curated resources.

Week 02.
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Practical Usage

A description of how to implement the information learned in the webinar or community conversations. This could take the form of an interview, a blog post, an article, or a case study.

Week 03.
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Live Q&A

A live discussion on the monthly topic with selected experts and moderated by the monthly curator.

Week 04.
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Bonus content

Additional relevant content from the monthly experts, like a white paper, a research report, or a business tool.

Welcome to the December Edition of Roundtable

Information 4.0: Inventing the Future

How do we design and deliver information in a hybrid world of human-machine interaction? The Fourth Industrial Revolution (aka Industry 4.0) presents challenges to everyone, and most especially to information specialists. For the first time in history, machines are making decisions that affect humans without human intervention. It is characterised by the spread of connected, autonomous objects (Internet of Things), driven by Artificial Intelligence, with Big Data behind it to train and inform the various algorithms. What is the place of information in this revolution, and what does it mean for practitioners?

– Ray Gallon (Curator for Information 4.0: Inventing the Future)

We kick this roundtable off with an exploration of the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution (aka Industry 4.0), how they affect information production and delivery, and a blueprint for information design and delivery that puts it directly into the DNA of future products and systems. Because without information, the Internet of Things is just a collection of things, and Artificial Intelligence is just artificial.

In week two, Ray Gallon and Andy McDonald, the initiators of the Information 4.0 Consortium, explore two real examples of products operating with Information 4.0 principles and technologies: The original Blippar app, which offered continuously updated information from the entire web in the form of ontologies, providing each user with an individual path based on their needs; and Google Duplex, an AI-based conversational agent that can respond to multiple inputs and customize its responses to a context.

In the fourth industrial revolution, information should be a key design element, but many technologists and business leaders either aren’t aware, or simply don’t know how to enable information in their products. In this panel, we’ll discuss information enabling as a central business need. How can we help raise consciousness about the importance of having information enabling capacity designed into products from day one, not as a tacked-on afterthought? We’ll focus on three areas: technology, people, and social issues, and cover topics such as:

  • What does it really mean to enable information?
  • Using Customer insight to design information
  • Leading Content Strategy by bridging Marketing, Support, Elearning and other teams…
  • How can teams of information enablers help the business?
  • What are the implications for society of not doing this?

Panel:

Moderator: Ray Gallon, president of The Transformation Society and Information 4.0 Consortium

  • Scott Abel, CEO & Chief Wrangler, The Content Wrangler
  • Marie Girard, Assistant professor in content strategy and architecture, Technical Communication Masters degree, University of Paris Diderot
  • Joe Gollner, Managing Director, Gnostyx Research Inc.
  • Paul Perotta, Perrotta Consulting
  • Anna Schlegel, Vice President, Global Portfolio to Market Lifecyle, NetApp

To be announced!

Roundtable Forums

Roundtable Monthly Topics

Did this month’s theme spark questions? Are you interested in learning more? This is the forum to ask questions and discuss your experiences, challenges, and insights related to the monthly topic.

General Tech Comm Queries

Do you have questions about technical communication? Use this forum to connect with other Roundtable members or curators to ask and answer your questions.

General Roundtable Queries

Do you have questions about Roundtable, or are you experiencing technical challenges? Use this forum to ask and get answer to questions.

Subscribe to Roundtable today!

Enjoy over $1,500 of fresh, high-quality content, including weekly webinars, published white papers, practical applications, live Q&As, expert panel discussions, and more!

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Previous Roundtable Topics

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2019 STC Roundtable Roadmap

Roundtable is a new, exciting educational content subscription offering from STC. It is separate from membership and provides additional ongoing professional development in the form of fresh, high-quality content for 48 weeks on topics relevant to technical communicators and curated by well-known experts.

Information 4.0: Inventing the Future

This curated series focuses on the informational response to Industry 4.0: Information 4.0, how it needs to be integrated into products and services that affect our daily lives, and what technical communicators need to think about going forward in order to do their jobs in an ethical, humanist way, and maintain their careers.

Content Engineering

Technical communications experts have a major headstart in the race to build the future. Personalization depends on structured content meeting real-time customer context. Delivering integrated experiences across various native content sets is directly derived from the practice of Content Engineering. Utilizing standard content and semantic structures allows content portability. Learn more about the practice of content engineering from one of the leaders of this emerging field.

Content Engineering (curated by Cruce Saunders)

Learning Experience Design

Join us as we explore the emerging field of Learning Experience Design (LX) – a holistic approach to designing, developing, and delivering learner-focused solutions. LX design weaves together methods and approaches from instructional design, user experience design, visual design, service design, and Design Thinking.

Learning Experience Design (curated by Phylise Banner)

Round the World in Four Weeks: Translation, Localization and Globalization

Translation is not a commodity. In a global economy, the world becomes more integrated, but technology cannot successfully produce all of the communication humans need and want. Translators are a junction point. This month we will discuss from the basic – defining globalization vs. internationalization vs. localization – and the small – how to write for translation and localization – to the large – what machines are already doing for us and where we see the industry in 20 years.

Round the World in Four Weeks: Translation, Localization and Globalization (curated by Phylise Banner)

Content Measurement + Intelligence

This curated series will help you start and use such a system to measure your content’s impact to inform content decisions and to show its value.

Content Measurement + Intelligence (curated by Colleen Jones)

Leadership and Teams

We’ll look at different modes of working together from both an organizational and an individual perspective.

Leadership and Teams (curated by Toni Mantych)

Content Design and Development for Machine Delivery

Are YOU ready to design machine-readable content that can be delivered in the context of your users?

Content Design and Development for Machine Delivery
(curated by Toni Byrd Ressaire)

Professional Development

Explore the benefits of professional development and specific methods for creating and executing a powerful career strategy.

Professional Development
(curated by Alyssa Fox & Alisa Bonsignore)

Content Strategy and Experience

We look at what content strategy actually is, how content strategy applies in a range of content environments, why to consider incorporating content strategy into your technical communication work processes, and where you can use content strategy to bridge silos.

Content Strategy and Experience
(curated by Rahel Bailie)

The Future of Technical Communication

Our future, the future of technical communication, is being written all around us, in a language we can understand: Our own.

The Future of Technical Communication
(curated by Scott Abel)

ROUNDTABLE SNEAK PEEK

The Future of TechComm

The future of technical communication. It’s a big topic. One that conjures up images of crystal balls and gypsy fortune tellers. But the future isn’t written in a secret language that only clairvoyants can understand. Our future, the future of technical communication, is being written all around us, in a language we can understand: Our own.
–Scott Abel

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Subscribe to Roundtable today!

Enjoy over $1,500 of fresh, high-quality content, including weekly webinars, published white papers, practical applications, live Q&As, expert panel discussions, and more!