Greeting fellow STCers!

In our last meeting, on September 28th, here's what we talked about...

• Upcoming meeting dates:
  * October 26th
  * November 23rd
  * December - no meeting. Instead, we will have our holiday party.
  

• Update on service activities:
  Kate sent an email to the room coordinator at Glazier's and he agreed to send us a list of the non-profit organizations that reserve the room. After Kate receives that list, she will send the groups an email offering our services. What a great way to give back!
  

• Kate presented on Writing for Translation - send an email to the address on our "Contact Us" page if you want a copy of the ppt

Thanks for a great meeting everyone! See you next month!

Your co-president,
Kate Tinklenberg

Hello STCers,

Here's what happened at our last STC meeting on 7/20/2011...

Attendees: Kate, Janet, Lonna, Eugene

• Reflection on Pantry Pals: We really enjoyed our time delivering food to seniors and hanging out at the cafe afterward. We want to do more!
  
  • Our next service activity will be Three Square's Sock Hop Bingo on Wednesday, August 24. We hope you all can make it and bring your family and friends too.
  • We also want to give our skills and talents to other non-profit organizations. To this end, we are contacting the other non-profit groups that meet in our meeting space to offer our services. Some services/skills that we know we can offer are: mail merge; editing/proofreading/grammar checking; website content editing, organization, and usability; brochures; instructions and procedures; manual and guides. We will evaluate all requests and assign each request to volunteers to manage and deliver the project. We will be cautious to make sure we only take on projects we can deliver with our limited resources. If anyone is interested in getting involved in this service activity, just send Janet or Kate an email.
    
  
  
• Revisited survey results:
  
  • Skype!!! Now that our location challenges have been resolved and we have Skype working again, we have confirmed that we have responded to the number 1 suggestion from the survey, which was to provide a telecommunication option to all of our members. We hope to "see" more of you at future meetings now that you can Skype in from home. Skype makes getting involved with STC easy. You don't have to worry about traffic or commute time. You can call in when you want, listen or not listen to whatever you want, etc. And you still get all the benefits of networking and knowledge-sharing with other professionals in the community that do what you do.
  • Free food!!! Our new location provides us with free snacks and refreshments at all meetings. Yum!
  • About half of our chapter members replied to the survey. Janet is going call the rest of the chapter members and try to get their input too. Stay tuned for results...
    
  
  
• Ideas/visions for our chapter:
  In our last pseudo-meeting (at the cafe after Pantry Pals), we threw around a lot of great ideas and visions about how we want to improve our chapter and make it more valuable to everyone. In this meeting, we started a running list of these ideas/visions that we will revisit at each meeting. We also started to prioritize these ideas/visions. We commiserated over the fact that we have such good ideas and such little resources to actually see them come to fruition. To this end, we decided that for next year, we will choose one idea/vision that we will execute and see to completion.
  
  
• STC summit summary:
  Janet was able to attend some of the STC Summit this year. She is usually pretty giving with her access to Summit at a Click, so if you're interested in the replays of any sessions, send her an email.
  
  
• Presentation (Kate): Writing for translation
  We ran out of time. Moved to the next meeting.
  

We hope to see you at our next meeting on Wednesday, August 17th, from 6:30-8:30 at Glazier's Food Marketplace on Warm Springs.

Your chapter co-president,
Kate Tinklenberg

Hello SoNev STCers!

We had an eventful and fun meeting on Wednesday. Here's what happened....

Meeting held Wednesday, April 13th, 2011 at Starbucks:

Attendees: Kate, Janet, Eugene, Jen, John L., Lonna

Agenda:

• Location:
  John Shipman threw his back out a few days ago and is OK, but heavily medicated and limited in movement. Understandably so, he forgot to let us know that he would not be able to attend our meeting and thus we would not be able to meet at our regular location. And so we improvised and held the meeting at Starbucks down the street. We wish John a speedy recovery and hope to see him at our regular location next month. However, we are looking into alternatives, just in case.
  
  
• Announcements:
  * Janet McCreary and I have agreed to share the responsibilities of the President and Vice President and instead be Co-Presidents of our STC chapter.
  * Coming soon: MySTC Network on the www.stc.org website. This will be a social networking site, similar to Linked-In and Facebook, for STC members (and guests).
  
  
• Summer outing:
  After looking at several options, the group decided to pick a Saturday sometime in June and get together for a meal and a service activity. We will be volunteering for an activity provided by www.volunteercentersn.org (affiliated with the United Way).
  
  ACTION: Take a look at the June volunteer calendar (remember, we're looking at a Saturday) and start thinking about the activities in which you would most like to participate. See the June calendar on www.volunteercentersn.org to learn about the activities available to us in June.
  
  
• Survey results:
  We decided to move this item to next month because Starbucks wasn't very conducive to showing slides and they wouldn't let us Skype with our remote members.
  
  
• The SoNev STC chapter website (http://www.stc-nevada.org):
  As most of you know, our website is horribly out of date. Several members over time have commented on the need to update our site, but up until now, we haven't had someone willing or able to dedicate the time necessary for this task. Now, John Limon has agreed to take on the task of updating our website. He has some great ideas and a vision for revamping our site. Thank you, John!
  

At our next meeting....

• We will decide as a group on the service activity that we will participate in and the day. We will also identify someone to take on the task of organizing the event - sign us up, coordinate any travel arrangements, send out announcements, etc.
• We will discuss the member outreach survey results.
• And much more... !
  

Thanks for such a fun-filled meeting!
Kate Tinklenberg

Reminder!

There's still time to respond to the member outreach survey.

Please take a few minutes and respond. Based on your responses, we are going to make changes to help everyone get what they want out of their STC chapter.

Thanks so much for your participation and support!

Your chapter president,
Kate Tinklenberg

Reminder!

The April chapter meeting will not be held next Wednesday, April 6th. Instead, the April chapter meeting will be held the following Wednesday, April 13th.

We hope to see you there!

Greetings from your new Chapter President!

We decided to use the blog to communicate our chapter meeting minutes, so here it goes....

Chapter meeting held March 2nd, 2011:

Attendees: Kate, Jen, Eugene, John S., Lonna, Janice, Janet

Agenda:

• Meeting location:
  For now, it was decided that chapter meetings will be held at 4100 W. Flamingo Road, Suite 2200. It is centrally located, provides wired Internet access, and is free. :-)
  
  
• Vice President election:
  Please welcome Janet McCreary as our new Vice President! And a big Thank You to Eugene for all of his hard work over the past couple years, especially with coordinating and managing our presentations.
  
  
• Member outreach:
  We talked about how to grow the attendance at our meetings. We want to make sure that you get what you want out of being part of a chapter. So, Janet, or another member, will be contacting you over the next couple months to learn more about you and understand what we could do differently to make these meetings more meaningful to you.
  
  
• Presentations:
  Potential presentations in the works include Writing for Translation (Kate), Writing for and with Microsoft (guest speaker), Updates to our chapter Web site (Lelia), Writing for unmanned aircraft (Janice), and a Demo of Snagit (Lonna). If anyone else has an idea for a presentation, please contact myself or Janet.
  
  Several members want to expand the topics of our presentations to include new and cutting edge technologies, and SMEs on products and services of interest to our community. Some ideas brought up were the cloud, software as a service, and how to use YouTube for instructions. Janet and I will try to incorporate these types of presentations as the year goes on. If anyone has any ideas or knows any SMEs on these topics or any other topics, please contact us.
  
  
• Summer outing:
  There was a general consensus to change the activity and location of the summer outing this year. Many ideas were brought up, including Mt. Charleston, Red Rock Canyon, Valley of Fire, Spring Mountain Ranch, Ethel M's Cactus Gardens, a potluck picnic, or a service activity. If we decide to do something outdoors, it was suggested that we move the date to an earlier month to avoid the heat. Janet and I will narrow down the list to 2 or 3 activities and put it to a vote at a future meeting.

Thanks to everyone for the great discussion and ideas! We'll see you at the next meeting on April 6th.

Your President,
Kate Tinklenberg