---
title: "Conferences I’m Attending This Year"
date: 2012-02-28
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $("
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2012/02/28/conferences-im-attending-this-year/
---
# Conferences I’m Attending This Year
![Ben Minson and me at a previous STC Summit](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/tomandben.jpg)

I attended Confab's inaugural conference last year and felt it was a good fit for my web publishing role at work. Although my job title is "senior technical writer," I spend about 60% of my time being a web editor for [LDSTech](http://tech.lds.org). LDSTech has a blog, wiki, and forum, and in many ways, it's the communication/awareness arm for our IT group.

Confab is a perfect conference for anyone involved in web publishing. I'm still wrapping my head around content strategy. Last year I learned that it means a lot of different things to different people. Mainly, whatever techniques you employ to give your content an edge is a content strategy. More than anything, Confab seemed like a web publishing / marketing / content strategy conference. Only a few technical writers were there last year, and you probably know them all (Scott Abel, Rahel Bailie, Ann Rockley, and a couple of others). Yes, only about five technical writers out of hundreds of attendees). Just like 2011, the Confab conference sold out early again this year. (I don't pretend to understand conference dynamics, but their staff seems to openly defy the law of supply and demand.)

When I'm not being a web editor, I write help material. Most of the applications I document are small in scope. I never document anything that has 1,000 topics or more. I remember once talking to Joe Gollner at a conference. He works on projects that have hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of topics. I can't imagine documenting anything so vast. I guess this means I've become more of a technical writer involved in lightweight projects. That suits me fine, though.

I initially wasn't going to attend the STC Summit this year. I submitted a proposal, but then changed my mind about the conference and withdrew my proposal. Because I helped review proposals for one of the tracks, I received a discount on registration. Despite canceling, I still had a nagging desire to attend the summit. Not so much for the education sessions, but because it's a conference that all my professional friends attend. It's the epitome of #techcomm. Some training budget funds opened up last week, and I managed to squeeze it in.

I'm not staying at the $200-a-night conference hotel, though, especially when that price doesn't even include Internet. The point in attending a conference or visiting any city isn't to abscond oneself in the hotel watching cable and lying on luxury pillows. The point is to get out and interact. I love walking around the city, exploring new places. I enjoy getting out of the hotel perimeter, past the point where every store caters to out-of-towners at hotel prices. Also, my travel budget isn't so vast that I can afford to stay in fancy hotels and attend multiple conferences a year.

The trouble with attending Confab and the STC Summit is that they take place two weekends in a row. This only goes to show that the Confab conference planners aren't targeting technical communicators, or that too many competing disciplines have conferences in the same short period of time.

The final conference I'm attending this year is Lavacon. I've never been to Lavacon, though I've helped out with the website for it. Jack Molisani asked if I'd like to present, and I got to thinking how nice it is to get out of the office in the fall, outside of the regular conference season. And yes, I do have a topic percolating that I'd like to present about: crowdsourcing writing tasks. The Portland venue makes the conference even more appealing, since I'm a northwesterner myself, born in Washington State.