My presentation is scheduled for Friday, April 15 at 11:30. The German title is:

Soziale Versionskontrolle für die Doku? Verteilte Versionsverwaltung als soziales Netzwerk

I’ll outline the advantages of version control in technical documentation projects, briefly trace the evolution from centralized versioning systems to distributed environments and social versioning platforms such as GitHub and investigate options for the use of distributed version control to support collaborative documentation authoring workflows.

For information on the conference (in German), see the tekom landing page for the conference. Though it isn’t immediately clear when the page loads, the links in the navigation menu on the left are all specific to the spring conference in Potsdam, including the program, list of speakers and registration information.

Details on my talk are available in the program, and I’ll post more information here as the event approaches.

See you soon in Potsdam…

But despite the laudable efforts in worldliness, English text on the tekom website and even the tagline reveal a decidedly German bias that will be very difficult to shake.

It’s odd that an organization that ostensibly caters to translators and the localization business (among others) should have such difficulty producing readable English or recognizing that German orthography seldom applies to other languages.

In fact, the recent English-language publication offering (also known as tcworld) regularly sports an English that is positively painful to the native reader and can often only be understood if you also speak German, evoking memories of the classic Otto Waalkes parody English for Runaways. Admittedly amusing, but hardly intentional…