Pangaea Papers
Kit Brown-Hoekstra
I’ve succumbed to peer pressure and am diving into the blogosphere after years of suggestions and cajoling by Brenda Huettner and Char James-Tanny, among others. As my coauthors for Managing Virtual Teams: Getting the Most from Wikis, Blogs, and Other Collaborative Tools, Char and Brenda had good reason to want me to practice what we were preaching in the book. My excuse has always been that I couldn’t think of a good name for the blog—one that adequately represented my disparate professional interests. I also didn’t want to start something that I couldn’t sustain—life took quite a few unexpected turns immediately after the book came out in 2007, and I knew I didn’t have the energy to give to such an important project.
Well, those excuses no longer fly. Life seems to have settled down a bit. Personally, the stepkids are mostly launched, households are combined, and things have settled into a nice rhythm. Professionally, I’m doing a lot more speaking, training, and consulting, which I love, and which are more conducive to mental and creative bandwidth needed for a blog.
And, I have a name for the blog that provides a somewhat geeky homage to my interests in global communication, localization, philosophy, and science, and to my passionate belief that our profession touches every industry, every product, every process, every aspect of life on this little blue marble. We, as professional communicators, have a unique opportunity and a responsibility that requires us to hold ourselves to high standards of excellence and continuous learning, and that we lead the way toward building rapport and communication channels with our colleagues wherever they live and work.
At the same time, I’ve finally gotten around to doing something with my Comgenesis corporate website, and it feels good to launch both the website and this blog at the same time.
And so, here we go! I hope you will join me on the journey, and contribute your thoughts, opinions, and knowledge. I love hearing from people, especially since I mostly work virtually from a home office—an extrovert living the life of an introvert…
Kit is a Fellow and the current Immediate Past President for the Society for Technical Communication (STC). She has spoken about various technical communication topics at many conferences worldwide. As a judge and competition manager for the STC publications competitions, she helped identify and reward excellent work in technical communication. In 2006, she coauthored (with Brenda Huettner and Char James-Tanny) Managing Virtual Teams: Getting the Most from Wikis, Blogs, and Other Collaborative Tools. In addition, she is the former editor of IEEE-PCS News, a frequent contributor to Multilingual, and a periodic contributor to TC World, and Intercom.