The LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy and Technical Communication Management Proposal Deadline for LavaCon Las Vegas: Friday, April 29, 5 pm PDT Contents About LavaCon... 1 Dates and Locations... 2 Speaking Summary... 2 Planning, Producing, and Managing Content Initiatives... 2 2016 Program Theme: Enabling Customer Success... 3 The Conference Venue... 5 The Slotzilla Zip Line... 6 How to Propose... 7 About LavaCon LavaCon is a gathering place for content strategists, content engineers, documentation managers, and other content professionals. LavaCon was started in Hawaii (hence our name) to give content professionals time and a place to get away from the office and tend to their professional development. It is a unique opportunity to share with your peers best practices and lessons learned (both what worked and what didn t). Our mission: To help organizations increase revenue and decrease costs by solving contentrelated business problems To give individual content professionals the skills they need to be more successful in their jobs To create a community in which content professionals can collaborate and advance the field as a whole Page 1
Dates and Locations June 5-8, 2016 Dublin, Ireland Registration is open October 26-29, 2016 Las Vegas, Nevada Now accepting speaker proposals LavaCon 2015 was attended by 350 Content Strategists, Content Engineers, Documentation Managers, and other content professionals who have influence over their company s content authoring strategy and purchasing decisions. Our 2016 event will be held at the newly renovated Golden Nugget Hotel in downtown Las Vegas. Given the proximity of Las Vegas to the high tech hubs in California and the Pacific Northwest, we are predicting 400+ attendees for 2016. Speaking Summary Breakout sessions are 60 minutes long. Pre-conference workshops are four hours long. Sessions requiring more time can be split over multiple time slots. Other info: Up to two speakers per session will be comp ed into the conference in exchange for speaking Speakers are responsible for their own travel and accommodations Proposal deadline for LavaCon Las Vegas is 5pm PDT on Friday, 29 April 2016 Questions? Email LasVegasProgramChair@lavacon.org See How to Propose on page 7 for submission directions. Planning, Producing, and Managing Content Initiatives LavaCon is a conference where content professionals can gain a solid understanding about content strategy and user experience (UX), and then leverage these skills to plan, produce, and manage content initiatives. In addition to sessions on managing content, LavaCon also offers sessions and workshops on managing people. Senior content professionals can learn soft skills such as workplace negotiation skills, how to overcome office politics and resistance to change, how to manage remote development teams, and more. Finally, it doesn t matter how great your content strategy is if you can t get management approval, stakeholder buy-in, or sufficient resources to implement it. So our program also includes sessions on how to calculate the return on investment for content initiatives, how to communicate that to management, and how to secure needed budget and resources. Page 2
2016 Program Theme: Enabling Customer Success Most content professionals have multiple customers they serve, regardless if they are employees, consultants, or vendors. Too often, content professionals focus on just the content, not considering that they work as part of a larger content and user experience ecosystem. How do you know if your customers are being successful? How do you show you are being successful? Our 2016 program will focus on how and why you should be focused on customer success, how to identify who your customers are, how to identify success criteria, and more. Case Studies It is one thing for attendees to hear they should implement a robust content strategy, and it s quite another to learn from peers who have actually done it. Our 2016 program will include real-world case studies from practicing professionals who have been there, done that and survived to tell the tale. Vendors may present case studies about their products if a customer co-presents and if the case study shows what the challenge was, includes how the customer overcame those challenges, and contains useful how-to information that attendees can take back to their offices and apply. In other words, case studies can t be just a product demonstration or state you should hire us because look how great we are, etc. They must include how-to advice and lessons learned that attendees can replicate and use themselves. Page 3
Tracks Sessions in our 2016 program will be organized into the following tracks: PLAN: The Content Strategy and User Experience (UX) track addresses how to plan content initiatives that maximize the user/information experience. Topics include spanning content silos, achieving content development efficiencies, maximizing the user experience across multiple devices (mobile, web, traditional print), gamification, accessibility, customer experience management (CXM), and more. This track also includes sessions choosing development platforms, creating documentation and project plans, estimating project scope and cost, estimating the ROI of content strategy initiatives, using content to generate revenue, etc. PRODUCE: The Content Development track addresses the Develop, Test, Deploy, and Maintain phases of the content development lifecycle: when and how to move to structured content and content management system, creating content for multichannel publishing, authoring for content translation and localization, controlled language, XML and DITA, when to retire content, and more. MANAGE: The Management and Governance track addresses how to manage content development people and projects. Topics include how to find and hire the right people, managing teams using metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), building business cases for funding and resources, managing remote teams, managing outsourced projects and tool vendors, recovering troubled projects, overcoming resistance to change, overcoming office politics, how to handle poor performers, etc. VIRTUAL: All sessions will be recorded (slides and audio) so attendees can later view sessions they didn t attend in person. We will also live-stream the keynote presentations and one session in each timeslot in our Virtual track. Page 4
The Conference Venue Please note that our Las Vegas venue is not on The Strip with all the craziness and in-your-face naughtiness that makes Las Vegas infamous. Nor is our venue at some remote resort in the desert, with nothing to do nearby. The conference hotel has been recently renovated, including their meeting space and their sleeping rooms. And you don t have to walk through a casino to get from the sleeping rooms to the meeting rooms. The Golden Nugget is also located at the foot of The Freemont Street Experience, a pedestrian mall that has free music and light shows on the canopy above: At the end of the Fremont Street Experience is the Fremont East District, an area that has reasonably priced restaurants, a container park of shops, and plenty of hole-in-thewall karaoke bars. This revitalized area of downtown is clean, safe, walkable, and fun the perfect location for LavaCon! Page 5
The Slotzilla Zip Line The Fremont Street Experience also features Slotzilla, a 12-story high zip line that runs above the Frement Street walking mall. There is a face-down version of the ride and a shorter sit-down version. A free Slotzilla ticket will be included in your LavaCon speaker/attendee registration. See the Slotzilla video for a preview of what you ll experience if you dare! Page 6
How to Propose Go to https://lavacon.wufoo.com/forms/lavacon-2016 and enter: Session title Session type (Session, Case Study, or Workshop) Your contact info A professional headshot A short description (fewer than 50 words) In this session, you will learn: (followed by seven or fewer bullets) A short bio Any special dietary or accessibility needs Notes: Submission deadline: Friday, April 29, 5 pm Pacific Daylight Time After the submission deadline, all proposals will be posted to a List.ly list so that people can vote on which sessions they most want to see in the program. A high number of votes does not guarantee acceptance, but it is taken into consideration by the Program Committee. Create a second proposal with the same title for a second speaker, if applicable Dietary or accessibility restrictions are not considered when selecting sessions. We will automatically register accepted speakers for the conference, and will do our best to accommodate special needs. Questions? Email LasVegasProgramChair@lavacon.org. See you in Las Vegas! Jack Molisani <jack@lavacon.org> Executive Director 1+ 562-726-1800 x201 Page 7