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Intecom

INTECOM (International Council for Technical Communication) is an international umbrella organisation for technical communications societies, which represents approximately 30 000 technical communications professionals worldwide through its member societies. The organisation aims at developing and making technical communications more recognised as well as encouraging international cooperation and the sharing of information and experiences between technical communications professionals in different countries.

The technical communicators of Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United States founded INTECOM in 1969. The organisation offers its member societies support in planning and implementing international conferences, advice in issues regarding technical communications and the freedom to use all materials and journals published by INTECOM. Membership also leads to discount charges at Forum conferences and the several events organised by other member societies.

Activities

Each member society is represented by one or two delegates, whose responsibility is to report to INTECOM about any news, plans and the number of members in their own society. The delegates from different countries gather annually in a General Assembly, which is held in different countries in connection with local society conferences or other training events. The issues discussed in the meetings include the news from member societies and different working groups, collaboration projects between the societies, future Forum conferences and membership fees.

A big part of INTECOM’s activities consists of organising the international Forum conferences, which help professionals in the field to network with each other. The specialty of the Forum conferences is idea markets. In idea markets, several speakers present their ideas in a room, and the audience can move freely from speaker to speaker and participate in the discussion. The most important matters are written on each speaker’s flip chart, and later a CD-ROM is produced, compiling all the important issues that were discussed in the conference. In the discussions, participants have a chance to meet other professionals from other countries and to exchange ideas and experiences with them.

Forum conferences have been organised every five years since 1975. In Forum 2000 it was decided that the next conference would occur in three years’ time, as five years seemed too long a time in a field where changes happen quickly. The most recent Forum conference was thus held in Milan, Italy, from June 30 to July 2, 2003. However, at the moment the field of technical communications is suffering from a general downturn and participation in the conference was lower than expected. As organising an international conference is a huge effort, especially financially, to the societies in charge of the organisation, the General Assembly held in Milan decided to move the next conference to 2007.

FTCS in INTECOM

The Finnish Technical Communications Society was accepted as an INTECOM member in 1999. In 2002, FTCS hosted INTECOM’s annual meeting in connection with our autumn seminar. Our society participates actively in INTECOM projects and our delegate takes part in the meetings whenever possible. Marjo Kuusto-Erve has been our INTECOM delegate from the beginning. The delegate position opens in autumn 2003, so a new delegate will be selected in the FTCS autumn meeting.

More Information

INTECOM website: http://www.intecom.org

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Last update: 20.09.2003