• Speakers

Speaker's list

• Ben Allums
  
  Ben Allums is the Director of Engineering at WebWorks.com. Ben's experience in the field of E-Publishing stretches back 14 years to 1994, when he toiled to create the definitive single-source publishing tool for FrameMaker, WebWorks Publisher. His experience was bolstered by his stint at IBM's Tivoli Systems where he came to understand the needs and requirements of Enterprise customers. Returning to WebWorks.com, Ben extended the boundaries of online delivery and information workflow through his work on WebWorks Help and WebWorks.com's Edit/Review product. His experience and knowledge culminated in 2005 with the delivery of the first Enterprise ready online publishing system, WebWorks ePublisher. Today, Ben continues to push E-Publishing's limits through his leadership of the ePublisher Platform. DITA support, Wiki publishing, and a focused commitment on delivering scalable solutions for businesses, regardless of size, are the hallmarks of his tenure at WebWorks.com.

• Mary Anthony
  
  Mary is a technical writer and documentation build engineer at Palantir Technologies in Palo Alto, California. Mary has over 18 years experience working in technical communications. She has written technical documentation, managed documentation teams, and designed user interfaces. Mary has experience developing documentation tool infrastructures at three different firms. Mary has worked with WebWorks off and on since 1998.

• Vicki Bialas
  
  Vicky is a technical writer at ArcSight in Cupertino, California. ArcSight, a leader in the enterprise security and compliance space, is embarking on a broad, community-based initiative for solutions exchange, networking, and knowledge transfer. Vicky played a key role in evangelizing, designing, and implementing Web Docs sites at BEA, Devicescape, and Qwaq to support customer engagement and success. She is working as part of a team at ArcSight to transform thousands of pages of static documentation into a Wiki Docs portal, integrated with the new ArcSight Community platform. The prototype will be demo'ed at the ArcSight user's conference in Washington, D.C. ArcSight is using WebWorks ePublisher and AutoMap to produce both Wiki documents and WebWorks Help. In another life, Vicky was a breakfast cook at the now-defunct Les Amis Cafe near U.T. These days, she surfs, swims, and drinks espresso.

• Lisa Dyer
  
  Lisa Dyer manages the Information Development group at Lombardi, Inc. As part of her daily job, she runs a knowledge base system in which DITA content and wiki content are mashed up to provide a rich source of community-generated and company-generated content. Lisa also runs the open source DITA2Wiki Project at SourceForge.net, and is an XML and collaboration enthusiast at large. She has a passion for obliterating knowledge silos and building rich, effective, and collaborative information experiences.

• Georg Eck
  
  Georg Eck is a graduate engineer from Georg-Simon-Ohm-University of Applied Sciences in Nuremberg, Germany. He is the founder of SYSTEC in 1990 and of SQUIDDS in 2009. Georg is an experienced CEO and expert with more than 20 years of experience in strategies of successful integration of tools and automation in technical documentation processes.

• Jae Evans
  
  Jae Evans is the Documentation Manager and a technical writer at RightNow Technologies in Bozeman, Montana. Jae’s technical documentation experience spans over twelve years, covering a range of topics from instructions for installing automotive seat covers to XML API development manuals. RightNow has been using WebWorks since 2002 and Jae has been managing their online documentation efforts since 2005. Currently, Jae is leading the campaign to produce more robust and media-rich online documentation and eliminate the use of PDFs for the company’s reference manual set.

• Anne Gentle
  
  Anne Gentle is a technical writer, blogger, and author of the book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. She also volunteers as a documentation maintainer for FLOSS Manuals, working on manuals for One Laptop per Child and SugarLabs, open source projects dedicated to bringing kid-focused laptops to developing countries and an education platform to the world. She wrote a blog for her employer at BMC Software on talk.bmc.com starting in 2005, and now writes her blog entries at JustWriteClick.com. She has been a technical writer for over ten years, and has acquired many interests in that time, including structured authoring, social media, XML models for technical documentation such as DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture), blogging, wikis, collaborative documentation, online user assistance, and writing in an Agile development environment.

• Richard Hamilton
  
  Richard L. Hamilton is Founder and CEO of XML Press. He began his career at Bell Laboratories developing computer software and has worked at AT&T, Unix System Laboratories, Novell, and Hewlett-Packard in jobs ranging from software development to product management to documentation management. In 2008 he founded XML Press, which is dedicated to producing high quality, practical publications for technical communicators, managers, and marketers. Richard is the author of Managing Writers: A Real-World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation, and editor of the upcoming 2nd edition of Norm Walsh's DocBook: The Definitive Guide, to be published in collaboration with O'Reilly Media. XML Press is the publisher of Anne Gentle's Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, and in early 2010 will publish new books by Alan Porter, and Zarella Rendon.

• Tom Johnson
  
  Tom Johnson is a senior technical writer for a non-profit organization in Salt Lake City, Utah. He writes an active technical communications blog at idratherbewriting.com. He also records podcasts, often interviewing technical writing luminaries around the world. And he started WriterRiver.com, a social news site where anyone can submit links to articles about technical communication. Tom is also a WordPress blog consultant.

• Liz Keene
  Liz Keene is a technical writer and documentation automation engineer with over 20 years experience in the software engineering. She has work on web-based documentation delivery systems for 10 years. She currently works for ArcSight where she specializes in automating the documentation process. She has developed an automation system using CruiseControl and ant scripts that automates the WebWorks conversion from FrameMaker source to both HTML and Wiki outputs and is triggered by source control checkins. This automation system supports the transition from delivering ArcSight Documentation as PDFs to a Wiki Docs Portal where customers can comment and provide feedback.

• Lauren Lever
  
  Lauren has a background in psychology and training, and received her Master's in Workforce Training and Development at the University of Southern Mississippi. She has been working in the realm of support since 2005, and also has done training wtih HTML and web design. As the main support at Quadralay, she has been declared "Support Goddess". Even her business card says it. When she is not reigning supreme in the world of webworks.com, Lauren likes hello kitty, industrial music, and go-go dancing!

• Tony McDow
  
  Tony is the Founder and CEO of Quadralay Corporation and worked for 12 years in the actual development of WebWorks Publisher, which was first released in 1994. Since 2004 I have been working with writing teams around the country, seeing first hand the challenges they face in capturing and delivering knowledge. With the launch of the ePublisher Platform, as part of the WebWorks team, I have been focused on enabling the publishing process to deliver the next generation experience to end-users, writers, and information architects of all types of organizations. Prior to Quadralay, I studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, and obtained MS in Engineering.

• Stewart Mader
  
  Stewart Mader is a wiki expert, experienced educational technologist, teacher, and author of the books Wikipatterns and Using Wiki in Education. He publishes the blog Future Changes, and teaches people at Fortune 500 companies, universities, non-profits, and small businesses how to improve productivity and collaboration using wikis.

• Paul Mueller
  
  Paul is President of UserAid, which designs and implements innovative communication solutions that deliver information when and where users need it. Paul received a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Mathematics from Pennsylvania State University and has been involved in technical communication for more than 20 years. Paul has managed information development, usability, and graphic design teams across the United States, Bolivia, and India. Paul often presents conference sessions about embedded help, management topics, and technology implementations.

• Alan J. Porter
  
  VP of Operations for WebWorks, Alan has 20 plus years in Corporate Publishing in the UK and USA. He has been involved in the development and adoption of various publishing standards and has been a regular speaker at industry conferences. He has held senior management positions at various publishing software and services companies, allied with extensive consulting experience. He is a published author with several books, comics, and magazine articles to his name.

• Bob Sima
  
  Bob Sima is the Sales Director of Tedopres’ North American operations, which is based in Austin, Texas. Bob holds a BA in Business and Psychology from the University of Maryland, near Baltimore. Bob has been working in the technical publishing industry for 12 years. He has held sales and marketing and product strategy positions with Intergraph, Corel and Micrografx and has experience with aerospace and defense publishing and has worked extensively with S1000D and other Mil Spec publishing standards.

• Christopher Ward
  
  Christopher and been part of the technology industry for the last 11 years. He was brought on to WebWorks to help determine clients’ needs and develop solutions around them. He has experience working with Fortune 100 companies on a global level as well as startup companies on local level. His professional commitment is to protect, serve and be extraordinary for the clients he meets and will let him. “Perfection does not equate to success, action does.”

• Jesse Wiles
  
  Jesse Wiles is a Software Developer at Quadralay Corporation. He joined Quadralay in 2002. Jesse's been involved with content conversion for 9 years. Frankly, he's a geek who also enjoys watching professional football, wrestling with his kids, and dreaming up ways to marry the ePublisher platform to the iPhone.