Back in October 2004, I attended a very enjoyable 2-day conference hosted by the Transalpine STC chapter. Talking with their members, I learned that they cover a very large geographical area, from Germany down to Italy, and from Switzerland right across through Austria. Their members all come together once or twice a year for their 2-day conferences, but they also have a number of Local Interest Groups, or LIGs. For example, there is a LIG in Berlin, and another one in Switzerland. This enables members who are relatively local to one another to meet up.

January 2005 saw me in Amsterdam for the Trans-European Technical Documentation Awards weekend, at which Region 2 director-sponsor Vici Koster-Lenhardt ran an excellent half day course for STC leaders. As part of that morning session, Vici explained how LIGs work. The wonderful thing is that there are no rules! LIGs are deliciously informal, open to STC members and to non-members, able to arrange occasional meetings for either a training seminar or for coffee and cakes and discussion.

Our UK STC chapter also covers a large area - I live over 3 hours from London, for example, and 4 hours from Edinburgh. So at the next STC UK board meeting, we discussed setting up what we loosely called "a northern LIG". We then took the thinking a little further and set up a "southern LIG". At the moment we still have just these two LIGs, one based roughly in Sheffield / Manchester and based on a grouping set up by Nancy Halverson, and the other based on London / Reading based on a grouping set up by Tina Hoffmann. But maybe there is potential for more LIGs in the UK? After all, we are a very diverse chapter with members living in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and all four corners of England. We even have a few chapter members who live further afield, but choose to be members of the UK chapter. If you are interested and would like to discuss what is involved, please contact Nick or Nancy and we'll be pleased to help you get it off the ground.

One of the challenges that we face as a chapter is how to communicate easily with our members. Until then, we have been using a Yahoo mailing list to send mails to our membership. Or rather, several lists, since Yahoo puts a limit on the number of mails you can send at once. I had a chat with Merrick Bechini at the STC office, and he kindly pointed me in the direction of STC's own Lyris list servers, which can be used to host mailing lists and discussion groups for STC.

We decided to set up three mailing lists using the Lyris list server:

• A one-way list to enable our STC UK management team to send communications to all our members
• A discussion group for the benefit of members of the northern LIG
• A discussion group for STC UK chapter managers.

At the moment, the southern LIG uses informal contact. Maybe in time we will set up a discussion group or mailing list for the southern LIG, too.

Things did not get off to the smoothest of starts. The very first time I sent a mailing to all STC UK members, there was an incorrect setting somewhere. I may have set it up wrong, or it may have been a system glitch. We fault traced, and we're really not quite sure what happened. Merrick Bechini kindly helped us to sort it out. But the result was that all our members received all of the error messages that should have gone only to the list manager. Understandably, several list members contacted me to point this out.

Gradually, we have broadened the use of the lists within our management team. Originally, as a security measure, I was the only person who could send mails to the main members list. Now most members of our management team are able to send mails to the members list.

We still face challenges, and there are things that we may well change. To begin with, each time that our membership secretary (Mark Clifford) sent me an updated Access database showing our current members, I used to wipe all members from the Lyris list and repopulate the list from the Access database. But then we thought that if a member had unsubscribed from the mailing list (and STC's Lyris servers allow recipients to unsubscribe), repopulating the list from scratch would mean that they'd start receiving mails again. So we switched to using a differential update to the Lyris list, just adding on new members. We've used that method for a while now, but I think we may need to change back: Under our present method, if a member changes the e-mail address that they have registered with STC as part of their membership, we won't necessarily pick up the change. We could still mail stuff to the old address. And we hate the thought of our members not knowing about forthcoming events and activities! So loading in the Access database each time is safer, more efficient, and quicker for our STC management team.

And we also have a need for what we might call "casual lists" - one-off mailing lists with a finite lifespan to enable us to mail everybody registered for a particular conference or workshop, for example. STC UK webmaster Ed Portas has been looking into that, and we are currently testing a program called List Messenger http://www.listmessenger.com.