Panel: Communication Strategies of Successful Virtual Teams

This was a panel, and I really enjoyed it. A fair amount of the focus (naturally?) was about inter-cultural communication between American workers and colleagues in Asia and India. A little bit on relations with Europe, but I guess at the moment with the rise of technology markets in China, India, and other areas in Asia, these are the most important areas for inter-cultural communications right now, and may be less understood for working relationships than European cultures.
Some points:

• Distance logistics - face time is incredibly valuable. Plan to do things that are more valuable during face time. Don't do stuff that can be done on the phone.
• You might start with broad cultural stereotypes, but alter your interactions as you actually know people. Resist the human impulse to blame stupidity.
• When you are thinking "Whaaatt????!!!???", say "Help me to understand ..."
• Be precise and clarify expectations - what does "I'll have that soon" mean?
• Consider getting a "culture coach" to help you with language and cultural differences.
• When editing, focus on language/grammar issues, not the person (that rule goes for any kind of editing!)
• Put SLAs to projects if performance has been an issue.
• Some voice-to-voice contact is needed every week.
• Be aware that as technical communicators, your vocabulary can be more extensive that other native English speakers, let alone foreign or second-language speakers

The panellists were: Lisa R. Pappas, Andrea Ames, Jan Pejovic, Geoff Hart.

STC Opening Keynote: Howard Rheingold

I only made a few notes in this session. Howard seemed impressed with himself.

He discussed that people get things done due to biology/competition - the strongest wins. He asked whether the threshold for collective action has been lowered? That is something to ponder, particularly as his only mention of mass technology-inspired convergence in Australia was the racially-motivated attacks in Sydney a couple of years ago (my ears always prick up if anything to do with Australia is mentioned, of course). I was also intrigued that while Finland and I think Japan were mentioned as early adopters of SMS/texting technology, Australia wasn't. I remember reading a few years ago that texting was far more prevalent in Aus than in the US at that time, it has possibly changed now. I found it curious because I remember sitting in my WEP classes at UQ in 2001 and one of my fellow students was lamenting text speak in younger students/undergrads and that the language of txtng would mean these students/young people wouldn't be able to spell properly (or wouldn't care to?) and that would create literacy problems in the future. Enough "he didn't mention Aus as early adopters" whining. :)



Rheingold said that literacy is learning the secrets of encoding and decoding language.

We shouldn't be keeping up with technologies, we should be keeping up with the literacies.