Hello, World!

Fred Sampson:

Retired Technical Communicator,
Content Strategist,
Author

My former day job entailed developing and implementing content strategy for data science products at IBM, including Data Science Experience and Watson Data  Platform. In addition to my work as a content strategist at IBM Silicon Valley Lab, I have also found myself in the position of accidental social media educator.

My professional interests included user experience design and information architecture as informed by the art and science of technical communication.

As a volunteer, I was most recently a member of the ACM SIGCHI Operations Team; I was Vice-President for Operations from 2009 to 2016; I was Vice-President for Finance of ACM SIGCHI from 2006 to 2009. I was a leader in the Silicon Valley chapter of STC (Society for Technical Communication) from 2000 to 2005, and contributed to STC at the society level: I was recognized with the STC President’s Award in 2004. And I’ve been webmaster for CHI and DUX conference websites.

My first, and likely only, book, Effective Prototyping with Excel: A practical handbook for developers and designers (Interactive Technologies), which I co-authored with my friends Jonathan Arnowitz, Michael Arent, and Nevin Berger, was published in 2009.

See the articles archive for online versions of my column and articles from ACM interactions magazine, from 2004 to 2008.

If you want to keep up with my activities in retirement, see the blog. Since October 2018 I have resided in Montpellier, France.

Mountains and waters?

The title refers to both Eihei Dogen’s Mountains and Waters Sutra and Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End, and to all the Chinese landscape paintings between. With a deep bow to the landscape of the Central Coast of California, where redwood forests meet the waters of the great Pacific Ocean, the waves run away like wild horses over the hills, and the great shroud of the sea rolls on as it rolled five thousand years ago. (Virtual Brownie points go to those who recognize the literary references.)