My name is Gordon McLean, and I’ve been a technical communicator for over 16 years, I’ve dabbled in web design, IA, UI design and most other areas within the Technical Communications field. I consider myself a jack of most trades, master of few and I’m happy to keep learning. This blog is part of that process.
Currently
I work for KANA Software as Product Operations Manager within the Product Management and Architecture team. I help, I hope, the rest of the team (the smart people) do their job and interact with other parts of the organisation.
History
I’ve worked in small cottage companies, quite literally, Crossaig, the first company I worked for was based in a converted cottage, for large corporations like Dr. Solomons and Sage (Tetra), and small companies that have batted above their average including McLaren Software and Graham Technology/Ciboodle. I’ve successfully created teams from scratch and have transformed the product information processes, and perceptions about information, across entire companies. I’m a big fan of single sourcing information and look to the web for examples of where the future of our profession lies.
More recently, as well as managing a team of (stellar) technical writers, I also manage and maintain a developer community website for our company.
I’ve only ever worked in the software industry, a lot of what I’ve written about from a work point of view is focussed mainly in that area but hopefully some of it will be applicable elsewhere. It’s a bit of a mish-mash of thoughts but by and large they are all grounded in technical communications one way or another.
I am a member, and current webmaster, of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators and a member of the Information Architecture Institute.
You can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter or just Google me (I’ve been on the web for a long time, I’m all over the damn place!).
Elsewhere
Through this blog I’ve been afforded the opportunity to speak at a couple of conferences, and had a few articles published in a variety of trade publications. They are listed here largely because I have a terrible memory and will forget otherwise.
Conferences:
- TICAD 2007 – Using Wikis for Collaborative Authoring
- Technical Communications Conference 2009 – Why Blog?
- Technical Communications Conference 2010 – Social Media Models
Online:
- Blogging: The Visible Conversation – an eSeminar as part of the Adobe sponsored series (includes printed supplement, see below).
In Print:
- Blogging: The Visible Conversation – part of an Adobe sponsored supplement covering “The role of social media in technical communication”
- ISTC Communicator Magazine (members only) – A day in the life
- For 4 years I wrote a monthly column for the ISTC newsletter called Blog News.
Re-published articles:
- Migrating from FrameMaker to Author-it… Why Author-it? by Author-it blog
- STC East Bay Chapter newsletter – The Black Art of Estimation
Ohh and apparently I’m one of the Top 50 Technical Writers on the web, who knew!