Volunteering

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Having gained several years of experience in the field already, in 2022 I decided I wanted to be part of a community. I already knew about the European Association of Technical Communication and had already attended the local technical writing conference, Evolution of TC, that was organized by the Bulgarian tekom country association, tekom Bulgaria. I started looking for info how can I become a member, but thanks to a colleague, I endend up actually becoming part of the initiative commitee of tekom Bulgaria.

This is how I started helping with the organization of tech writing events in Bulgaria.

• The first event that I helped with was BarCamp+ in Nov 2022. Later that year, as we had also revamped the tekom Bulgaria website and had made changes to our social media channels, I suggested we try to increase the engagement among the tech writing professionals in Bulgaria by trying out a more personal approach. I search on LinkedIn for technical writers located in Bulgaria and I got over 500 results, which was a lot more than the number of official members we had in tekom Bulgaria. What I did was to add more than 100 technical writers to my own LinkedIn network and I sent every one of them a direct message with inviting them to follow our social network pages and take a look at our new website. Although we did not get any new members for tekom Bulgaria right away, at least I managed to expand my own network with a couple of new contacts. (:
• In 2023, I also took part in the organization of the conference that I had only attended as a participant a few years earlier - Evolution of Technical Communication (TC). For this conference, we were trying to minimize costs, so I contacted the bigger universities in Bulgaria to find out if we could use their lecture halls as a venue for the conference. We ended up having the conference in the local VMware office just because it offered better conditions and we were able to use it free of charge because tekom Bulgaria already had members working for the company.
• In 2024, we were again looking for ways to still make the Evolution of TC conference happen despite tight budgets and increasing costs. This time, the local SAP office was the venue for the conference as we were lucky to have SAP as the main event sponsor, too.

In addition to that, me and my volunteering coleagues are also constantly looking for different ways to spread the word for the tech writing profession among the younger generation and also among other professional communities.