STC-Phila. Metro Chapter

Society for Technical Communication

Chapter at a Crossroads: President’s Critical Message

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I’ll get straight to the point:

We need a president and treasurer, or else our chapter is going to be inactive. We are better than that.

Our nomination and election were delayed due to the pandemic, and we held our nomination period earlier this month. Sadly, we have no candidates for President, one candidate for Treasurer/Secretary, and only a couple of volunteers to be Directors for the next program year.  Since our immediate past-president, Tim Esposito, is moving off the chapter council for his new role as STC Secretary, I need to move into the immediate past-president position and cannot run for President again.

This is now your chance to lead. If you step up, you can show your boss how you can lead, make a name for yourself, and take the reins.

“Sure, I want to help and learn leadership skills, but I don’t know what to do and I don’t have much time.” The new operational structure will be significantly lighter, so you will only dedicate a couple hours per month to the chapter, and we all benefit. It’s my job to help train you to help run the chapter no matter which position you take in my new role.

Our needs boil down to this:

  • President: A “project manager” to oversee things.
  • Treasurer: If you can balance a check book, you can be a community treasurer.
  • Directors: A small group that supports the President and Treasurer to plan and manage a few activities/events.

The President and Treasurer/Secretary roles are the only elected roles; the others are volunteer, and you get out what you put in.

If we don’t get President and Treasurer/Secretary candidates and a couple more volunteers, we will either need to merge with another chapter or worse yet, go inactive (essentially fold). We need YOUR help! This is no joke.

Step up and be a leader! The effort is minimal, and a new team will breathe new life into the chapter. Be part of that!

When you are ready to take that step to being a PMC leader, complete the nomination form. The nomination form will stay open until July 15, or until we can see that we have enough nominees to hold an election.

I look forward to seeing YOUR name on the nomination form!

If you have questions, you can email me at president@stcpmc.org, and I will be happy to answer them or set up a call or video chat to address your questions.


Danielle M. Villegas
STC-PMC President

Election Nominations and Volunteer Nominations

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Nominate

This year, STC-PMC is changing up the structure of our Administrative Council. We want to be dynamic and svelte and to match the trends in our organization. As such, we are looking for nominations for the following roles:

  • President (elected): The role of the STC-PMC President is to represent the chapter for the STC and act as its liaison to the Society. The President acts as an advisor/project manager for the entire chapter, leading the Council team in delegating and completing chapter activities that help to educate, network,  recruit, and maintain the chapter membership. The President determines and sets the main plan for the programming year, and communicates the information to the STC office liaisons and other STC presidents. The chapter President supports the Treasurer and the Directors at-large in their activities and helps to ensure that the activities succeed, including running regular meetings to ensure that things are running smoothly. The President is also responsible for facilitating the STC applications for Distinguished Service Chapter Awards, Community Achievement Awards, Associate Fellow nominations, and Community Pacesetter Awards.
  • Treasurer/Secretary (elected): The chapter treasurer is in charge of tracking all incoming and outgoing monies for the chapter. The bulk of this work is tied to chapter activities, such as monthly meetings, expenses, and conference expenditures. The Treasurer and President have debit cards associated with the checking account. This enables them to buy things for the chapter without requiring reimbursement, although receipts must be submitting for all transactions, and those transactions are reconciled with the chapter’s bank account on a monthly basis. The treasurer is also responsible for the submission of the yearly budget to the STC Office, and submitting any short tax forms on behalf of the chapter. The treasurer’s role is important as that person helps the chapter understand how to budget for the activities they want to do. The Secretary part of the role involves attending all the STC-PMC Council meetings, and keeping notes based on the meeting agendas.
  • Directors at-Large (volunteer): This is a newly created volunteer position starting in 2020, and we need several of them. A Director at-large is part of the Council team, who in turn supports the President’s initiatives for the program year. The Council team shares the responsibilities for running the chapter. These responsibilities include:
    • Membership
    • Programming
    • Publicity/Promotion
    • Conference/Sponsorship
    • Academic Outreach
    • Mentoring
    • Business partnerships
    • Chapter digital management (website, emails, email contact list, etc.)
  • All Directors will be trained in all aspects of these activities for effective job sharing, and responsibilities will rotate or change on a regular basis as the President assigns so that you will not be stuck always doing the same thing. This is a great opportunity to learn leadership skills and build upon multiple soft skills with support from your fellow Directors, and help shape the chapter going forward.

All chapter executive candidates must be current members of the STC – Philadelphia Metro Chapter.

Click Here to Submit a Nomination!

Nominations are due June 6th, 2020, and elections will commence the following week. You must be a member to participate in the elections, but anyone can make nominations or volunteer to be a Director at-Large.

President’s Important Message: A New STC-PMC for the 2020s

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TL;DR: Big changes are coming in how STC-PMC will operate going forward, and you can be part of shaping the chapter’s future.

This is going to be a bit of a long letter to you, STC-PMC chapter, but I do it in the interest of transparency.

I don’t think there’s a person out there that would disagree that 2020 has been a challenging year so far—and we’re only halfway through! The coronavirus has shaken all of us to our core, and it’s caused a lot of people to rethink how they want to be doing things once the pandemic lifts.

As 2020 approached, the STC-PMC council had been rethinking how we do things as a chapter. Sure, from the outside, the Philadelphia Metro Chapter has been seen as a powerhouse among STC chapters. After all, we were the STC Community of the Year in 2018. We’ve won the Platinum-Level Community Achievement Award every year since these awards were introduced, and we’ve won several Pacesetter Awards. We’ve produced an STC President, an STC Secretary, and numerous STC Directors. We’ve had many members who’ve become Fellows and Associate Fellows, and we’ve had several Distinguished Chapter Award winners.

In the last few years, a small, dedicated group of volunteers has worked hard to keep up these appearances. Our passion for technical communications, promoting our field, and sharing our knowledge with others drives us to keep our chapter alive. Even so, decreasing membership and reduced funding mean that we don’t have the resources needed to continue to support the chapter as we have in the past.

Through many discussions within the STC-PMC council, as well as with the STC Community Affairs Committee at the board level, we decided that the best way to ensure a sustainable future for the chapter—one in which we continue to serve our membership and the local tech comm community—is to downsize. We’re making some significant changes to how our council is structured and how our chapter operates, starting in the 2020-21 program year.

Council Restructuring

Until now, STC-PMC has been run by an elected President, Vice-President, Secretary, and Treasurer, with additional volunteers helping out with specific tasks—including publicity, academic outreach, and website maintenance—for the duration of each program year (September–June). While this structure made sense when the chapter was much larger, we haven’t had enough new volunteers to help fill these roles. As a result, many of the current volunteers have taken on multiple roles, leading to burnout, and some tasks have simply gone undone.

Starting next year, we’re reorganizing the council to include only two elected positions: President and Secretary/Treasurer. All other responsibilities will be shared among volunteer Directors-at-Large. The Directors at-Large will be cross-trained in various aspects of chapter activities, so that no single responsibility falls only on one person. This will also give the Directors at-Large experience with multiple leadership skills that will help them grow—not only within the chapter, but also in the workplace.

Reduced Programming

STC-PMC does A LOT! We have traditionally organized a monthly event—whether in-person or virtual—for our members and other interested parties throughout the program year. In addition, we’ve planned and produced CONDUIT, our celebrated tech comm conference, every spring. We’ve had some fantastic chapter events in the past few years, but attendance has been dwindling, and we often lose money from our meetings.

To better serve the chapter’s needs, we expect to have fewer events than we have in the past and—learning from this pandemic period—to use virtual meetings more effectively whenever possible. This is not to say we won’t have in-person events—we hope to enjoy many more festive holiday potlucks and year-end banquets! But we do envision a pared down schedule of events in future program years to better fit the needs and resources of our membership.

Moving Forward: Elections and Virtual Town Hall

Our chapter elections have been delayed because we wanted to ensure that we had all of this figured out. Now that we have a plan, you’ll be seeing election correspondence soon so that you can nominate yourself or someone you know for the elected positions (President and Secretary/Treasurer) or volunteer for the Director-at-Large positions.

To allow everyone—chapter members as well as those who are interested but not yet members—a chance to ask questions and get more details on what’s going on, we’re going to be holding a Virtual Town Hall on Tuesday, May 26th at 7:00 PM ET. (We’ll post details on this website’s calendar on the homepage shortly.) We would like as many of you to come as possible to ask questions and offer ideas and feedback. This is your chapter, after all, and the council wants to hear from you and let you know how you can participate and help.

Additionally, we want to know what kinds of events you would most like to attend! Take our quick 2020 Program Survey to help us know how to program the upcoming year to best meet your needs and interests.

We believe strongly in this chapter. Members of the Philadelphia Metro Chapter have always proven that we are up for challenges and we can more than meet them. We are confident that going forward, with this new council and operations structure, we can continue to be the strong chapter we’ve always been, just on a smaller, more sustainable scale.

I look forward to seeing you at our Virtual Town Hall and speaking with you, and I hope you will consider being a member of our council to help shape the future of the chapter.

If you are unable to attend the Virtual Town Hall, feel free to email me at president@stcpmc.org with any questions you may have.

Thank you for your continued support of the STC-PMC, and talk to you soon,

Danielle M. Villegas
STC-PMC President

RESCHEDULED: CONDUIT 2020 is now on October 17, 2020

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Reset button

Dear CONDUIT attendees, presenters, and other supporters,

As we mentioned in our posting on our website and in social media yesterday, the STC-PMC made the difficult decision to reschedule CONDUIT 2020. The Franklin Institute had given us assurances that they would be taking additional measures on top of their already excellent facilities.

However, many other facilities and areas around the greater Philadelphia area have been closing down in the interest of public health safety. With the conference only three weeks away from this writing, we knew that the right action to protect all involved would be to reschedule the conference.

The Franklin Institute worked with us, and we are pleased to announce that we have been able to reschedule CONDUIT 2020 for the fall–specifically Saturday, October 17, 2020.

We are also pleased to let you know that our keynote speaker, Phylise Banner, will still be able to come and speak, and for that, we are thankful.  We are waiting to see if our other presenters will be able to return as well, and we’ll be updating our conference speaker web page over time.

We are keeping our registration site open.

  • If you have already registered for this event, and can still attend on Saturday, October 17th, you don’t need to do anything to re-register.  We will honor your current registration in October.
  • If you have registered and are unable to attend on that day, or wish to transfer your registration to another person, please contact me at conduit@stcpmc.org.

We know that we have attendees who come from out of town (including myself) who will need to make changes in their travel and accommodations. By ensuring this new date and confirming it, we hope that those who can attend can hopefully transfer their arrangements for that date.

This was not an easy decision to make, but we know that in the end this was for the greater good. It gives us time, too, to ensure that when you do come to CONDUIT 2020, it will be even more spectacular.

If you have any questions about this decision or about the conference itself, again, contact me at conduit@stcpmc.org.

We look forward to seeing you in October!

Best regards,

Danielle M. Villegas
STC-PMC President, Co-Chair of CONDUIT 2020

Event Recap: Agile Living with David Dylan Thomas

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David Dylan Thomas lead STC-PMC members through his agile living process in his presentation “Agile Living: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Never Be Done.” Attendees gathered in Strafford, PA on January 26th to explore how technology has evolved to better leverage unpredictability and how that relates to agile being a better way to think about life and ourselves.

View the presentation slides

Download the agile template

About the Speaker

As a content strategist for EPAM, David Dylan Thomas has developed strategies for major clients in entertainment, publishing, and retail. He is the founder of Content Camp, co-organizer of Barcamp Philly, head of Content Strategy Philly, and the creator, director, and co-producer of Developing Philly, a web series about the rise of the Philadelphia tech community. He has given lectures on such topics as the future of content in a post-ownership economy and the hidden power of online links. To find out more about Dave you can find him here: @movie_pundit

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