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Speakers - AODC 2009

The following speakers will be sessions at AODC 2009 - Melbourne.

We were fortunate to be able to present an exciting and expert group of speakers from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. They represent an enormous pool of talent and experience. As well as a collection of new speakers, we appreciated the return of some of our most popular speakers from previous years.

Emily Cotlier (Harris Stratex Networks)

Emily Cotlier is a Senior Technical Author with the Wellington R&D location of Harris Stratex Networks, Inc, and a board member of the Technical Communicators Association of New Zealand. With a Master’s degree in Scientific and Technical Communication from Drexel University, she has 16 years of experience in IT, scientific, and engineering communications. For the past six years, managing localizations and translations has been part of her work as a technical communicator.
Senior Technical Author

Session Topics

Matthew Ellison (Matthew Ellison Consulting)

Matthew Ellison has 18 years experience as a user assistance professional in the software industry. He has been a popular speaker at online documentation conferences since 1997, and now runs his own independent UK-based training and consulting company specialising in online Help design and technology. Matthew holds a B.Sc. in Electronic Engineering and a Post-Graduate Certificate of Education from Bristol University in the UK. He is also a Certified RoboHelp Instructor and a MadCap Flare Certified Instructor.

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Gerry Gaffney (Information and Design)

Gerry Gaffney is well known in the usability field, and has written and presented on a variety of usability and related topics. He is co-author, with Daniel Szuc, of The Usability Kit (Sitepoint, 2006). He is co-author, with Caroline Jarrett, of Forms That Work: Desiging Web Forms for Usability (Morgan Kaufmann, 2008). Gerry was managing editor of User Experience, the print magazine of the Usability Professionals' Association (UPA), for two years, and is now a member of the editorial board. He has spoken and conducted usability workshops in Australia, USA,Italy, Hong Kong, China and Taiwan. Gerry lectures in User Centred Design at Swinburne University. He produces the popular User Experience podcast (www.uxpod.com). His company website (www.infodesign.com.au) contains a range of usability tools and tips, and is widely referenced.
http://www.infodesign.com.au/

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Dave Gash (HyperTrain Dot Com)

Dave Gash is the owner of HyperTrain dot Com, a California firm specialising in training and consulting for hypertext developers. A veteran software professional with over twenty years of programming, documentation, and training experience, Dave holds degrees in Business and Computer Science, and is well known in the technical publications community as an interesting and animated technical instructor. When he's not developing Web pages, scripts, and help systems for his clients, Dave is a frequent speaker at User Assistance seminars and conferences in the US and around the world.
http://www.hypertrain.com/

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David Lowe (Inmedius Australia)

David Lowe has over eighteen years of experience, primarily focused in Australian Defence telecommunications and aviation, with a strong background in avionics and rotary wing aircraft. He is a member of the S1000D Electronic Publications Working Group (EPWG), and has in-depth knowledge of numerous technical publishing standards, including S1000D, ADFP 102, DEF(AUS) 5629B, and DEOP 110. Prior to joining Inmedius in 2008 as Managing Director of Inmedius Australia, David was part of the Tiger Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter (ARH) Technical Documentation Team at Australian Aerospace, a subsidiary of Eurocopter and the only helicopter producer in Australia and New Zealand.

Session Topics

Sarah Maddox (Atlassian)

Sarah Maddox is a technical writer at Atlassian, the company which develops and sells Confluence (the enterprise wiki). Sarah has worked as a technical writer for ten years, at various companies and using a variety of tools. She is now a wiki enthusiast, though also well acquainted with the challenges of using a wiki for technical documentation. She writes up some of her experiences on her blog at http://ffeathers.wordpress.com.

Session Topics

Gareth Oakes (GPSL)

Gareth Oakes is a technical consultant who has been working in the field of enterprise publishing for 7 years for companies such as Advent3B2, Arbortext and PTC. Gareth's history in programming and multimedia has allowed his career to cover many roles from software development and systems architecture through to training and sales.
www.gpslsolutions.com

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Deborah Pickett (Autodesk)

When it comes to DITA experts, they don't come any more expert than Deborah Pickett. A DITA Technical Committee member for many years, Deborah has been an important contributor to the development of the DITA standard and its specialisations, and to the DITA Open Toolkit. Since 2005, she has been working as a Technical Communicator, Information Architect and Software Engineer at Moldflow (now part of Autodesk) in outer Melbourne. Despite her heavy commitments, Deborah still makes time to answer questions, however complex or simple, for posters on the DITA community mailing lists. In 2007, she was awarded the DITA Mentors Award by DITA Users founder Bob Doyle, who observed that Deborah "is one of the outstanding reasons the worldwide DITA community is so vibrant".

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Allyn Radford (Learn'ilities')

Allyn Radford has achieved international recognition for the design and development of solutions for eLearning and eBusiness. Allyn has held positions in private enterprise, higher education and fee-for-service education where he has designed and built a range of innovative infrastructure solutions to satisfy client and stakeholder requirements. During the past six years Allyn has been very involved in the implementation of a range of standards-based learning infrastructures and has become a respected member of the international community working on educational technology standards.

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Tony Self (HyperWrite)

Tony Self is a founding partner in HyperWrite Pty Ltd, which was the first hypertext document development company in Australia. Tony has over 20 years documentation experience, including 13 years with online and hypertext documents in WinHelp and HTML formats. He has managed large online documentation projects in Australia and New Zealand. Tony has undertaken roles in technology training design and delivery, and computer-based training development, in Australia and Ireland. He has spoken at conferences in Australia, the United States, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. In addition to consulting, Tony lectures in technical communication at Swinburne University. He is the co-author of Swimming With the Tide, a Business Guide to the Internet.
http://www.hyperwrite.com/

Session Topics