It’s quite easy to vote online for STC officers, just dig out the email you received from stc_election@stc.org that has your STC identifier and password, click the link to https://eballot.votenet.com/stc, and enter your ID and password. Once you’re on the voting site you can click through on the ballot to read each candidate’s position statements.
I’m tickled that two people of the most energetic academic instructors I’ve met are on this year’s ballot, Hillary Hart and Sandi Harner. Hillary Hart is in the Austin chapter and teaches engineering students about technical communication at the University of Texas. She and I worked on a committee to build the program for our hosting of the Region 5 conference, and Hillary’s great to work with, plus just fun to talk with. She uploaded a 30-second video about her candidacy to YouTube – take a look. The live oak trees behind her and the sunny breezy day are Austin classics!
I’ve talked to Hillary about the Body of Knowledge and she accepted and listened to my concern about overlap in effort with the eServer Technical Communication Library, a resource I frequent quite often. Hillary explained that the BoK approach is much more like a portal, offering pathways for those who have no idea what technical communication is. They are using personas to design the portal and I enjoyed reading those very much, but they must have been embedded in the survey because I can’t find the list online. One of the personas is available online in a Tieline article – the age 50 plus persona. Another persona may be a hiring manager or HR representative who is not familiar with technical communication. They are looking to partner with existing content sites as well as offer original content too. Quite the resource! Side note: the forest contains the trees contains a forest of trees – the Tech Comm Library has a category about Body of Knowledge.