I just attended the LavaCon Content Strategy Conference (for content professions, a.k.a. technical communicators, technical writers, and MANY more) for the first time ever, and it was like Christmas and my birthday all at once. I attended the Virtual Track from the comfort of my home, so I was not in Portland, Oregon. Thanks to the very professional setup and management, the conference was marvelous, and I loved it. The Virtual Track will go on my wish list for 2025 for sure. Only virtual because I want to avoid flying.
My mind is still trying to wrap around where to begin summarising for my work colleagues. If pressed to tell you my top takeaways, here is what I’d say:
1. Accept our responsibility (our duty, even) to become AI literate and teach others and think hard about potential abuses. This is just one gem from Noz Urbina‘s profound talk entitled “Truth Collapse – The AI Metacrisis”. As Rahel Anne Bailie put it, Noz discussed “the collapse of truth, our (willing or not) participation in it, and a caution for society”. He got a standing ovation from the attendees.
2. Metrics. Damn metrics. So hard to find good and useful metrics. We have some at work, and some that we want, we cannot get to for confidentiality reasons, logically enough for now. But several speakers gave me some ideas that I will share at work about other areas to measure like time savings on our whole publishing pipeline, as opposed to just focusing on various KPIs around some of the writing and editing tasks.
I’ll leave my count at two for now. When I glance over the titles and my notes, I see plenty of quality insights to ponder, like a talk on “designing for failure” that involved canaries from the always excellent Relly Annett-Baker. Others talked about ways in which GenerativeAI can truly be helpful to our processes and not just a shiny thing to slap on to everything because someone is having selfish fantasies about it. Through it all, I heard how powerful content still is and still will be, but it might need some tweaking, so to speak. That is, we (who write the content) must market it better to people who don’t realise that what they call information and data is actually content that we can deliver – if we can just sit down and have a nice dialog about it all.
A massive thank you to Phylise Banner for running the Virtual Track so professionally and beautifully. I really picked up on the sense of community and family found at LavaCon, and now I can kick myself for not attending before. Jack Molisani did a good thing inventing Lavacon many years ago. I mean, they have therapy dogs and therapy llamas at the conference. That is awesome. Jack also did something that shouldn’t be remarkable, but which I really liked and appreciated. When closing the conference, Jack asked various people running the conference to stand up so we could all clap and show our thanks. He also called all the restaurant staff to come on stage to receive a round of applause, to show that we all (well, not the virtual attendees exactly!) valued their efforts at making the conference a success. Jack gets an extra star in my book for being a kind human being.
(To prove how inspired I am by LavaCon, I created my first blog post in more than a year and a half! Gasp! What is the world coming to?)