Eight persons attended the 14th formal meeting, which happened to be the lowest attendance ever at a formal event. Of course, that did not make the talks any less interesting, or the conversation any less insightful. You just had to be there, for the talks, for the pizza, and for the learning.
Joaquim Baptista
My presentation started at 19h20. I explained how technical writers at Farfetch collect information for the API references. Basically, you have to answer the right questions, and we can guess what those questions are.
Pedro Silva
Pedro started his presentation at 20h00. Pedro shared his experience in a department of 100 people doing knowledge management for 130.000 employees.
- The company handled half a million support tickets each month.
- The department created documents as an outcome of solving problems. To ensure the creation of documents, solved tickets had to link to an article or URL.
- As a metric of effectiveness, the department tracked how many customers opened a ticket after reading the documentation.
Pedro described how the department ultimately changed the company.
Pizza break
Thanks to Andreia for handling all the logistic details, including the very delightful pizza that we savored by 21h00.
The invitation (15-Jun)
Greetings to all technical writers, and to everyone interested in technical communication!
It's been a long time since our last formal meeting... but we're back!
- Tuesday, June 26th, 19h00-21h00.
- Farfetch Lisbon office.
- Rua do Instituto Industrial 7 - 3rd floor, 1200-225 Lisboa (a 10 minute walk from Cais do Sodré).
- There are two doors into the building. You want the door farther away from the river.
Come to learn from your fellow writers and network over pizza!
- Joaquim Baptista (Farfetch): Writing API References
- Developers face many questions when using an API. Joaquim shows how guessing those questions guides writers into gathering and presenting focused answers, exactly where developers will look for them.
- Pedro Silva: Knowledge Management: the wOw
- Pedro is sharing his experience of working as a knowledge manager in the Support Dept for a multinational software company in the UK. First, he'll cover the ecosystem at large: people, processes and tools as well as provide context around the content. Then, he'll go over some of the major challenges as the team looked to improve the quality and effectiveness of the content for customers and also achieve better efficiencies within and across departments.
The participation is free, but subject to room capacity. Feel free to extend this invitation to friends and other interested parties. More interesting participants will improve the learning experience for everyone.
Thanks to our sponsors for all the support: Farfetch (room and pizza), APCOMTEC (marketing) and EuroSIGDOC (site).
— Alexandra Albuquerque, APCOMTEC president, info@apcomtec.org
— Carlos Costa, EuroSIGDOC chair, carlos.costa@acm.org
— Joaquim Baptista, EuroSIGDOC vice-chair, px@acm.org
PS: Rosário Durão was insightful and inspiring, as usual. She used the site below for reference: https://quicksprout.com/the-complete-guide-to-building-your-personal-brand/
PPS: I need more speakers to kick-start formal meetings in Porto. Talk to me if you might know of possible volunteers, including yourself.
PPPS: APCOMTEC is offering a 4-day Summer school in early July, followed by a half-day colloquium. See below for the sketchy details, but notice that the price is quite affordable. https://www.facebook.com/pg/apcomtec.org/posts/
Attachments
- The 14th Report
- 15-page report of the meeting, including the slides of the presentations.