Here is Rahel Bailie’s report from tcworld 2024 conference and exhibition. Rahel is TWi’s Content Solutions Director.
The tcworld conference, which took place this year Nov 5-7 in Stuttgart, Germany, is one that I rarely miss.
It’s one of the larger content conferences, with well over 2,000 in-person attendees and almost as many online participants. This conference focuses on technical communication, which means that as many of the presentations are about pushing the envelope of technology as they are about editorial quality of content.
The tcworld conference program
The program is split between English and German, which sometimes means that you miss an intriguing topic when you realise it’s in the language you don’t understand. However, as there are about a dozen simultaneous presentations, plus various vendor presentations, you don’t lack for choice.
Evidently the conference got double the number of presentation proposals than ever, so the quality of the presentations was high. There are some presenters who are perennial favourites – Sarah O’Keefe talking about content operations, Leah Guren talking about editorial quality, and Toni Ressaire on the topic of AI.
The predominating theme was, naturally, artificial intelligence. Many presentations focused on how to leverage it as an editorial assistant, RAG models and better prompts, but ethics and the EU AI Act were also represented.
The tcworld trade show
The trade show covers the ground floor, with over 100 companies exhibiting their software and/or services. Each year, I discover a couple of new vendors whose services provide a new level of automation or different mental model or reflects advances in the industry.
This year, I spent time with a couple of vendor partners, as well as colleagues whose experience with the vendors gave me insights valuable to my work as a consultant.
Workshops at tcworld 2024
The past few years, I’ve run workshops on content operations, and this year’s workshop was full, and we had to pull in a couple of extra chairs. I was surprised that at least six participants had a job title that specifically stated “content operations” – a divergence from previous years, for sure.
This year, my workshop focused on identifying waste, calculating resulting efficiencies, and effective presentations of the results to management.
The compressed time slot allotted meant that the exercises had to be given as take-home work, but there was plenty of opportunity for sharing experiences and learning new things. Participants expressed their enthusiasm, as management interest in operating models for content is becoming more prevalent.
Trends in technical writing world
In line with other conferences, AI is still on everyone’s minds. Every vendor has built some sort of AI functionality into their product. Mostly, AI features offer assistance of some sort: summarising, suggesting wording, monitoring consistent terminology, and so on.
The trend among vendors to direct attention to delivery platforms was seen at tcworld, with one vendor explaining that it’s easier to sell delivery because that’s the visible evidence, and reduce focus on the authoring end. While I understand the motivation behind this, we once again see the needs of authors being diminished when, in reality, having robust tools is quite important to make the delivery platforms perform well.
What comes next?
The call for presentations for next year’s conference will open soon, and early bird rates will be announced about the same time.
Whether or not your area falls within “technical writing” or you work on product content, knowledge management, or localisation in the larger sense, you’ll want to find out more about what happens at tcworld.
Maybe we’ll see you next there next year?
