Finnish technical writers are great – TCEurope Colloquium 2017

We visited the wonderful city of Helsinki, Finland, to attend TCEurope Colloquium 2017. Here’s what we learned about the Finnish tech comm scene.

The event

Finnish Technical Communications Society joined forces with TCEurope to organise the event that took place on April 7th, 2017. Most of the audience were technical communicators from Finland, though some of the speakers joined all the way from the Netherlands and Poland (us!)

The event took place at the Service and Activity Centre for the Visually Impaired (Näkövammaisten liittory) in Helsinki. The 120-seat room was full. Spirits were high. The food was great.

The topics

Speakers at TCEurope Colloquium 2017 focused on presenting use cases, and mostly successful ones. Although we all know we learn better from mistakes, it is nice to hear about successes. Among the speakers we had:

• • Dr. Joyce Karreman showed us examples of user design processes in creating technical content.
  • Joakim Nybäck who showed us CMS automation through API
  • Willam van Weelden took us on a philosophical journey to the heart of meaning, and presented the latest tech news from Adobe
  • Nick Hill who gave us his view on future trends in tech comms

…and more.

The presentations were very well received by the friendly audience and stimulated a lot of discussions during the breaks.

Our presentation

A 3di representative talked about knowledge feeds. We already mentioned feeds in our post about using AI to organise your intranet, and the presentation expanded on the idea. Knowledge feeds present information in they way it is shown on your Facebook feed. They try to engage you by presenting something that is relevant in your situation. That way, you get a chance to discover “hidden” features of a product.

The party

After the conference, we attended the networking dinner. As often the case with technical writers, we started talking about grammar. You know us, 3di people, we love geeking out about language. And we love good food, of which there was plenty.

The dessert was interesting too: pineapple ravioli. Which was the restaurant’s code for ice cream with pineapple slices. A misnomer, no doubt, but a tasty one.

The summary

TCEurope Colloquium 2017 was fun and informative. We will try to come back next year, no doubt about it.