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Exploring the Impacts of
Pervasive Computing |
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by Scott Tilley
SIGDOC is the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group for Documentation, a professional organization dedicated to advancing topics in documentation for and with computers. This year's SIGDOC 2002 conference was held from Oct. 20-23 in Toronto, Canada. The attendance figures were up from last year, hopefully pointing to a recovery in business travel and the overall economy. The theme for SIGDOC 2002 was "connect", a reflection of desire to bridge the gap between the different stakeholders in any documentation project (e.g., technical writers and software developers). This theme was echoed in many of the papers that appeared in the conference proceedings, many of which specifically addressed this ongoing problem. In fact, I'd estimate that half of the papers at SIGDOC 2002 were from computer science, which I view as a very healthy statistic for the future success of the SIGDOC organization. SIGDOC 2002 consisted of 14 paper sessions, 2 tutorials, and 2 workshops. The two tutorials were on "Architecting Information for the Web" and "Documenting APIs and SDKs". The tutorials were followed by a welcome reception for conference attendees at the Toronto Hilton hotel. The two workshops were on "XSLT for Technical Writers" and "Graphical Documentation for Programmers" (GDP). The latter was a follow-up to a similar workshop held at SIGDOC 2001, called "Documentation for Software Engineers: What is Needed to Aid System Understanding?" The inclusion of workshops into the SIGDOC program has proven to be quite popular, since there is the opportunity for increased interaction in a workshop setting (as opposed to a paper presentation). I certainly enjoyed the GDP workshop, and hope to organize something similar at next year's conference. The paper sessions were as follows:
As always, it's hard to pick favorite parts of the conference program. Nevertheless, I think for me the presentation of the Diana Award to the W3C organization was definitely one of the highlights of the week. The Diana award is made to an institution or organization that has made an outstanding life-time contribution to the field of user documentation. The tremendous influence that the W3C has had on the evolution of the Web certainly qualified it for the award this year. I thoroughly enjoyed this year's conference. Kudos to the General Chair, Kathy Haramundanis of H-P, and the Program Chair, Michael Priestly of IBM Canada, for putting together such a wonderful event. The program was strong, the people were pleasant, and Toronto was great! The next SIGDOC conference is already into the Call for Papers stage. SIGDOC 2003 will be held Oct. 12-15 in San Francisco, CA. The General Chair for SIGDOC 2003 is Channing Hughes of Unorthodocs, and the Program Chair is David Novick of the University of Texas at El Paso. The theme for 2003 is "Finding Real-World Solutions for Documentation: How Theory Informs Practice and Practice Informs Theory". If you're really planning ahead, think about SIGDOC 2004, which will take place sometime in October 2004. The location will be Memphis, Tennessee. If you'd like to get involved, please let me know! | ||||||||
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