by Meredith Blackwelder

To tell you all what is in store
Might be a bore.
But with cool stuff in the pipe,
The fruit is ripe,
And STC Carolina kicks off the new year
With a few new leaders and no traces of fear.

So now that I’ve peaked your interest with my awful poem-writing abilities, here are my top three goals for 2002-2003.

1. Make the web site work for you

How many of you frequent the www.stc-carolina.org web site? There’s a haven of both dynamic and static information stored there, such as a calendar of all upcoming activities, past events, directions to events, names of leaders, employment opportunities, and much more. I’d like to put effort into increasing your awareness of our web site, and make it a place that you rely on for all your STC information. To do that, we will review the usability and thoroughness of the site, and then make some improvements to it so you will think of it first when you need STC info. Kim Flint, our chapter webmaster, will help spearhead this effort. Thanks, Kim, for your work in the past, as well as being dedicated to making our site even better than it already is.

2. Work with the NCSU Chapter

We should take advantage of being so close in proximity to the NCSU student chapter — we should share ideas and events, and work together to establish a symbiotic relationship. In particular, I want to make sure students in the NCSU chapter know that they are welcome at our chapter’s events, including monthly meetings, SIG meetings, and training workshops. We can learn as much from them as they can from us. To achieve such a relationship, we plan to coordinate with Stan Dicks, our academic liaison, and Lars Nelson, the NCSU Chapter President.

3. Kick off the mentoring program

I plan to encourage the implementation of an STC Carolina Chapter mentoring program. This program will be useful for both “old hat” technical communicators and rookies. The preliminary planning for the program began last year, so look for this to take off quickly in 2002 with the leadership of Emily Toone and a handful of volunteers who promise to make this program a success.

There is a great leadership board that will be the driving force behind the success of our chapter next year. I look forward to working with Sheila Loring, Anneliese Kellner, Cindy Richardson-Decker, Greg Berg, Mir Haynes, Catherine Goodfellow, Michael Harvey, David Heath, and Kim Thorton. This is a great team of people who are not only dedicated to STC, but are fun people to work with.

I'm looking forward to serving as your President. I believe that this year will present an interesting menu of topics and a plethora of events for all types of technical communicators.

If you have any comments on these goals, or if you have some ideas on how you can contribute to helping achieve them, please send an e-mail to me at mblackw at earthlink dot net.