Stimulus Online - Editor's Desk

September/October 1998

A Look Ahead

by Tim Scapillato

Tim Scapillato is a consultant working for
Public Works and Government Services Canada.
He is this chapter's newsletter editor for 1998/99.

Technical communicators in eastern Ontario will have lots to talk about in the coming months. Take a look at the events calendars in this issue of Stimulus and you can see that new STCEO president Lynda Simons and her executive have put together an ambitious program for the upcoming season. Several valuable sessions, sponsored by both the STCEO and the ITE (Institute for Technical Editors), will provide excellent opportunities to network and upgrade your skills. Remember to visit the STCEO Web site for the most up-to-date information on all upcoming events.
Our Webmaster, Rick Lorenz, does an excellent job maintaining the Web site. Members with email have become accustomed to receiving Rick's weekly notices of new job postings to the site. This service is just one of the many advantages of membership in the chapter. While several other chapters have Web sites, few of them offer as much information as Eastern Ontario. Rick looked at the services that other chapters are providing online, particularly in the area of employment information in the technical communications field. He checked 20 chapters, from Eastern Ontario to Stockholm, Sweden, and found that only four—Boston, Eastern Ontario, Montreal, and Toronto—actively make job leads available. Surprisingly, seven of the 20 chapters had no

Web page at all. One chapter actually charges employers to place ads, while another will provide information to members who send in a SASE. It is not a coincidence that the most active job banks are to be found in areas with significant concentrations of high technology industries. While visiting the Web site, be sure to check out the new HTML version of Stimulus. I would like to thank Denny Barch for the time and effort that has gone into the design of this new electronic publication. (His own creative and innovative Web site, Denny's Place, is worth a visit.) Chapter members now have three distribution options available to them: hard copy by snail mail, downloadable PDF version, and full text online HTML version. Rick and Denny have worked together to create a Stimulus archive so that all issues from this point forward will be available from the Web site.
Having dealt with the issue of accessibility, we will continue to work to provide useful and interesting content. If you would like to provide an article, or have ideas on topics that should be examined here, please contact the editor or any member of the executive listed here. Let's make this as interactive as possible.
A reminder that the 10th annual InterChange Conference will be held October 19-21 in Boxborough, Massachusetts. The conference is co-sponsored by the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and the Boston and Northern New England Chapters of the Society for Technical Communication. It is designed for technical, marketing, and scientific writers, market researchers, editors, managers, graphic designers, educators, and students. Sounds like this is aimed at every one of us. For more details check out the Web site at www.interchangeconference.com.