Getting engaged with ACM SIGDOC

This year’s SIGDOC conference (October 23-24 in St. Paul, Minnesota) is a can’t-miss event for any technical communicator. The conference program is filled with excellent topics that cater to a wide range of audiences. I’m excited for so many of the sessions! Whether you’re a working writer, a student, or a researcher, there’s something for you at SIGDOC this fall.

We connected with the SIGDOC conference committee to follow up on the SIGDOC conference, including other events and how to be part of next year’s conference. Thanks to Luke Thominet (chair), Ashley Hardin (industry liaison), Morgan Banville and Elena Kalodner-Martin (co-chairs), and Quan Zhou (conference chair) for sharing their insights about the conference:

What is SIGDOC?

SIGDOC is a professional association focused on technical communication. We hold an annual conference, publish peer-reviewed research, and run grants and awards programs. Our community includes students, faculty, and working professionals.

Our name stands for the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group (SIG) on the Design of Communication (DOC). So in addition to being our own professional association, we’re also part of a larger computer science community in ACM alongside groups like SIGCHI (computer-human interaction) and SIGAI (artificial intelligence). This association with ACM helps us give technical communication more visibility and a seat in broader discussions about how technologies are developed and used.

SIGDOC 2026 will be October 23-24 at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota. The program is full of great work on a range of topics such as SEO and AI, developing video-based technical communication, rhetorical UX for climate action, crisis communication, content strategy and style guides, visual health communication, and nonprofit content strategy, among many other things.

We also have hands-on workshops, presentations from our Career Advancement Research Grant and Design Justice Grant recipients, and an Ignite Talk where local organizations will discuss their communications strategies. The Ignite Talk is on October 23 at 5:30 pm. It’s open to everyone to attend with no registration required.

A highlight each year is our Student Research Competition. As an organization, we strive to support people throughout their careers. The competition supports both undergraduate and graduate students in technical communication and associated fields.

Finally, Saturday’s keynote features Natasha Jones, this year’s Rigo Award recipient for lifetime contributions to the design of communication. Jones’s work on Black technical and professional communication examines how texts and technologies shape the lived experiences of Black and marginalized communities. It has been central to the broader social justice turn in technical communication scholarship.

What’s the history of SIGDOC?

In 1974, Joe Rigo put a notice in the Communications of the ACM to ask if people were interested in forming a group to discuss “technical writing, system documentation, and communicating with nontechnical associates.” Based on a positive response to this notice, he founded the organization in 1975. At that time, it focused specifically on systems documentation. The first conference followed in the early 1980s. As the field changed over the years, our name also changed, though we’ve always kept the same abbreviation. In the early 2000s, we changed our name to the Design of Communication to reflect how our work had grown from the documentation of hardware and software to include web applications, user interfaces, and other communication technologies.

Officially, our mission is to “advance the state of knowledge, encourage the research, and support the interdisciplinary practice of the design of communication.” By the “design of communication,” we really mean information architecture, user experience design, and technical communication in all its forms.

Connecting academia and industry has always been central to that mission. We think we’re stronger together and have a lot we can do to support one another. You can see this collaboration in a range of our initiatives.

We’re particularly proud of our publications, which are all now available for free through the ACM Digital Library. Our yearly peer-reviewed conference proceedings share some of the most up-to-date research and practices in the field. Our journal, Communication Design Quarterly (CDQ), offers in-depth discussions of communication design across disciplinary and practice boundaries. We welcome submissions to both publications from researchers and working technical communicators. Beyond traditional academic articles, both publications also invite industry insights, which are shorter articles on current best practices in communication design.

One of our newer initiatives is the Structured Authoring Committee, which includes academics and industry professionals from companies like Google and Red Hat. Its site hosts a growing library of free articles and tutorials for teaching and learning structured authoring and content management. They cover a range of topics including DITA, docs-as-code, and AI, along with career-focused advice on things like building professional portfolios. The committee also offers a range of workshops throughout the year that are free to SIGDOC members. If you work with structured content, the committee is a great place to start, and they’re always looking for more writers and reviewers.

What other events are coming up?

Beyond the conference, we run online workshops throughout the year. Here are our upcoming events for this fall:

October 30 at 12 pm EST: How to teach “tech writing tools.” Jim Hall will share how he teaches a hands-on tools course at the University of Minnesota that covers GitHub, Markdown, DITA, and more. SIGDOC members can register here

November 6 at 12 pm EST: Academic interviewing practice. Graduate students will practice interviewing for academic jobs with real faculty who will ask them typical interview questions and give feedback. Students can register here

November 20 at 12 pm EST: Stop rewriting your resume. Kat Reierson will demonstrate a content-reuse approach to job hunting: build a career-history reference file, then hand it to an AI assistant to draft a tailored resume and cover letter for each application.

December 11 at 12 pm EST: Structured authoring best practices without XML. Stan Doherty will show how far you can go in teaching structured authoring using only standard word processing technologies like MS Word or Google Docs.

We’ll share registration links for the last two sessions on our LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Facebook pages in the coming months.

When is next year’s SIGDOC?

SIGDOC 2027 will be November 4-7, 2027 at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. We’re co-locating next year with CPTSC, the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication, which brings together people who run and teach in academic programs. They’re a lovely conference that we’ve co-located with before. CPTSC will hold its conference during the first couple of days, and ours will follow after that. We’ll be sending out the call for proposals shortly after this year’s conference.

Anyone can present, whether you’re an academic, an industry professional, or a student. You don’t need to be a member to present or to submit to the proceedings.

We welcome a broad range of topics from both research and practice, including content strategy, information architecture, project management, UX design, and AI-assisted writing, as well as work in related fields like healthcare and crisis communication. You can propose an individual research paper, an experience report, a poster, a panel, or a hands-on workshop. Experience reports are a particularly useful way to share practical lessons from your work.

We release the call for proposals each year in November, and proposals are typically due in early January. The initial proposal is approximately 500 words long, describing your planned project. We send the proposals out to reviewers, and you’ll then hear back about a month later with a decision and feedback.

Accepted presenters are then also welcomed to submit an article to our peer-reviewed proceedings, though this is not required to present at the conference. First drafts are typically due in the spring, and each article goes through a separate peer-review process and second draft before publication. Our proceedings are published open access through ACM’s digital library. Publishing in the proceedings can be a great way to share your work and position yourself as a subject matter expert in the field.

Thanks to everyone for this look into SIGDOC! If you’d like to learn more about SIGDOC, members of the leadership team were interviewed on two podcasts last year: The Big Rhetorical Podcast (Episode 178) with Charles Woods and Pedagogue (Episode 174) with Shane Wood.

For more information, you can find them online at the SIGDOC website, on Bluesky, on LinkedIn, and on Facebook.

Don’t forget this year’s SIGDOC conference! You can register for SIGDOC 2026 on the conference website. To get the member rate, be sure to join SIGDOC or ACM before starting your registration.