Knowledge shared is knowledge gained

Last year, I attended the tcworld conference in Bengaluru to get an idea of what international tech writing conferences are about, but this year, I was going in a slightly different capacity. I was asked to present my experiences working as a Technical Writer in Australia.

The conference had a good mix of international and local speakers, speaking about a variety of topics, ranging from content strategy to DITA/XML to delivering the next generation of dynamic content to showcasing new features in tools/applications. It was more or less what tech writers wanted to know and a few presentations hit the right chords.

My first ever experience presenting was quite good, and surprisingly not as terrifying as I’d imagined. I only found out 24 hours prior to my presentation that the conference venue/halls didn’t have internet access (sticking with whatever Murphy’s Law equivalent there is in the presentation world), but was able to download a remote/local copy for presenting. About 20-30 people listened (or so I convinced myself) to what I had to say and nodded their heads to a few things, which I will gladly interpret as agreement.

The opportunity to interact with other writers was fantastic. I also enjoyed attending a few others presentations, learning a few things that I can hopefully get to use with my current job.

The twin (Technical Writers of India) logo sums this up quite nicely – Knowledge shared is knowledge gained. They are not far from the truth!