It’s hard to believe that the Tekom/tcworld Conference, held November 8-19th, is already over! For the second year in a row, the world’s largest technical communication conference, went virtual, and we were there!
The conference brought together hundreds of leaders and visionaries to discuss, challenge, and learn about innovation in our cross-disciplinary environment.
Topics of discussions included Artificial Intelligence in Technical Communication, Authoring Systems, Content Management, Documentation Software, User Experience, and of course Intelligent Delivery of Information.
Technology Days
Tekom innovated this year and dedicated 2 full days for Interactive Live Sessions, where industry experts shared their know-how and then answered questions from the audience live.
It was the perfect occasion for Fabrice Lacroix, CEO at Fluid Topics to embark everyone on one of his favorite topics “Next-Generation Analytics for Technical Content” or how tech doc teams can improve their documentation efficiency and deliver an increased value to the whole company with the right analytics tools. If you attended the tcworld conference but missed his keynote, you can watch the replay.
If you want to dig into this topic (or didn’t attend the conference) and see real-life use cases of Fluid Topics analytics, you can check out this 25-min webinar: 3 Ways to Improve your Technical Efficiency with Content Analytics.
At Tekom, Fabrice also participated in a panel discussion alongside Florian Ziche, Senior Software Architect at Noxum, Jannik Westram, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Empolis Information Management and Pradeep Jain, President and Chief Content Architect at Ictect and the four of them gave us insights into the field of technical communication and software documentation.
The forthcoming of Social & Semantic Technical Documentation
Fabrice wanted to share his vision on the future of technical documentation inspired by his experience as a Web pioneer. During his session “Tech Doc will go Social and Semantic, just like the Web did”, he discussed how today’s technical documentation still worked like the good old Web 1.0, a one-way publishing of static textual content, written by humans to be read by humans, and explored what would Tech Doc 2.0 and 3.0 look like if it followed the same evolution as Web 2.0 and Web 3.0.
And we weren’t actually the only ones talking about the link between writing for humans and writing for machines. Rebecca Andersson and Jennie Bergström from Ericsson AB, touched on this specific subject. They have both been involved in diverse parts of documentation that will be read by different software. They are both currently working on changing the existing information model into something that can be read by both humans and machines.
“We will not have full control over the new publishing channels for our content.”
They pointed out the expectations that every industry is facing right now: chatbots, product information integrated in tools, VR/AR and larger extent of personalized content, and highlighted how they were trying to solve these challenges at Ericsson.
Summary
While the past two years have been far from ‘usual,’ the Tekom team did a fantastic job of keeping this year’s conference engaging and valuable for its attendees.
Whether the goal was to simply observe or to actively engage and network with others, attendees certainly got the value that we’ve come to expect from the annual Tekom Fair.
“There is so much to benefit from attending the Tekom conference, spending quality time and exchanging insights with other participants. I’ve come back with fresh perspectives, new connections in the industry and lots of ideas to make Fluid Topics even more relevant to its users.” said Géraldine Boulez, VP Marketing at Fluid Topics.
How about you? Did you go to the tcworld conference this year? What did you think? Make sure to check our favorite quotes from our Twitter feed!
We are already making our plans for 2022 and can’t wait to see you, in real life hopefully!
NB: If you’re interested in knowing more about Fabrice’s view on the Social and Semantic Web, make sure to read this online article in the tcworld Magazine.
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