Highlights from Write the Docs Atlantic 2023

The parliament recently had the opportunity to attend the first Write the Docs Atlantic, which took place September 10-12, 2023. This virtual conference brought together about 300 folks from around the world to discuss and explore topics related to documentation.

KnowledgeOwl has been sponsoring and participating in Write the Docs conferences since 2015, and we were proud to be able to support and participate in this new edition to the Write the Docs family of events.

About KnowledgeOwl 

We help documentarians build knowledge base websites. We call our team members owls, and our entire team a parliament, since we are a group of owls. 

KnowledgeOwl has been building knowledge base software since 2015. Around this time, the amazing Diana Potter introduced us to the Write the Docs community and we’ve been hooked ever since. We started by sponsoring and running the Boulder/Denver meetup; our dear friend and colleague, Bri Hillmer, spoke in Portland in 2016; and we’ve been sponsoring and attending the conferences around the globe since 2017. 

People use KnowledgeOwl to build knowledge base websites, including everything from support sites and product docs to internal playbooks and team documentation. Our tech writing customers love that it’s both easy to use and affordable while also offering a robust feature set that gives you the power and freedom to write the docs your way. 

Whether you're looking for a demo, want to discuss your specific needs, or are interested in contributing to the community through our paid guest blog author program, come say hello or hoot - we’d love to chat!

About Write the Docs

Write the Docs is a thriving community for people with a passion for software documentation.

Write the Docs strives (and we think succeeds!) to be ‘the most welcoming internet community’. It is focused on the art and science of writing documentation. Members of this group call themselves documentarians, and this can be anyone who cares about software documentation, communication, and their users regardless of job role or title.

While other technical writing communities exist, Write the Docs brings together programmers, writers, support professionals, marketers, and others for a unique mix of linguistic flair, technical expertise, and a passion for great experiences with software.

You can checkout our spotlight on the Write the Docs community to learn more.

Platform and Accessibility

Like the virtual WTD conferences that started during the pandemic, WTD Atlantic was hosted on Hopin, which has proven to be a user-friendly and accessible platform that helps recreate the magic of in-person WTD conferences in an online format. The virtual nature of the conference enabled attendees to participate from the comfort of their homes, which eliminated the need for travel and made the conference more inclusive and accessible (check out some Survival tips for virtual events).

Before the pandemic, WTD had been largely focused on in-person meetups and conferences. I distinctly remember being in an unconference session at an in-person WTD Portland meetup one year, and there was a person who was strongly advocating for a remote/virtual meetup.

This person was talking about how difficult it was for them to overcome their social anxiety to travel and attend in-person events. This was the first time I had ever considered that the WTD community might not be accessible to a significant segment of the community, because I have always considered WTD to be one of the most inclusive, accessible, and kind communities on the Internet—but to participate, one used to have to be able/willing to join in-person events.

I was delighted to join an unconference session called Neurodiversi-Tea, and one of the topics discussed was how the virtual nature of the Atlantic conference meant that people who would otherwise not have participated felt comfortable to join. The pandemic forced many conferences, including WTD, to temporarily become virtual. Now that in-person events are back, it has created an opportunity for WTD to intentionally choose to host virtual conferences, which allows more people to experience the community and find their people.

Virtual WTD conferences allow people to participate in whichever way they are most comfortable. For example, someone could participate in the conference as just an observer, because there are no requirements to turn on one’s camera or interact with others.

There are also plenty of opportunities to meet with small groups of people and choose one’s level of participation. Some of our owls attended conference sessions only; some spent most of their time in unconference sessions and hallways; and some attended a mixture of the two!

Writing Day

The main purpose of Writing Day is to encourage conference attendees to make progress on individual and collaborative writing projects through synchronous writing “sprints”. Writing alongside one’s documentarian colleagues can be a way to “harness the positive momentum of the community” to make progress and overcome writer’s block. If attendees don’t have a current writing project to work on, they can still participate in Writing Day by providing constructive feedback on other attendees’ writings.

Here are 3 Writing Day projects that we’d like to highlight:

• The Good Docs Project: Led by Good Docs Community Manager Alyssa Rock, this was a collection of workshops focused on making progress on various Good Docs Project initiatives. The Good Docs projects is a community who aims to make software documentation better through best practice templates and writing instructions for open source projects. If this sounds like something that interests you, there are a few ways to get involved:

  • Visit The Good Docs Project website to learn, connect, join, and contribute. 

  • Join the #templates channel in the Write the Docs Slack and join the discussion there!

• Brainstorm a Help Center Style Guide: Led by Stephanie Alexis Gonzaga,  attendees came together to create a template for new-ish help center writers. If I wasn't leading my own session, I totally would have gone to this as this is something we talk about a lot with our KnowledgeOwl customers!

• The Blog Writing Room: Led my me (!), we design this sessions to give technical writers and documentarians a space to come together to work on blog posts in a supportive and collaborative environment. This was our first time submitting and leading a Writing Day project, and I'm excited to do it again in the future!

Talks

Every WTD conference features a variety of talks on the main stage. These talks are typically not interactive (though listeners can add comments in the live chat).

Here are highlights from a few talks that we particularly enjoyed:

• [Talk] Matt Dodson - Graphs, not trees: A ground-up approach to fixing a docs site.

  • Don't focus first on high-level structural changes; think more about your readers and their docs journey.

  • Start first with bottom-up maintenance, like fixing broken links, writing better intros, and making obvious edits/trims.

  • Idea of “nonboarding” - when starting a new job, don't go through the full onboarding experience right away. Instead, read the docs and test the application to get the full user/reader experience and to help you discover any documentation gaps you can fill.

• [Talk] Chris Meyns - AI ethics for tech writers

  • Some ethical risks to consider: the inevitability of the AI sometimes generating incorrect info, accountability displacement (it’s easy to blame AI when things go wrong), data exploitation (how were the models trained?), and climate impact.

  • The CO2 emissions of training 1 Large Language Model (LLM) is equivalent to 150 round-trip flights between Beijing and NY. 🤯

  • Some potential remedies:

    • Be choosy about which generative AI tools you use and pay attention to how their models were trained.

    • If you let your readers interact with AI, do routine quality checks and proactively communicate the risks to your users.

Unconferences

In addition to the talks, there are also unconferences running at the same time. Unconferences are more interactive, because unlike regular talks, because they're structured to allow participants to interact in small discussion groups. They can be about whatever the participants feel like discussing!

This is the first year I spent the majority of my time in the unconferences. Over time I have really come to value the connections and relationships I’ve developed through the WTD communities, and the unconferences are a way to both connect with people I love in the community and meet new friends. While there’s something magical about watching the talks live, they will be posted on YouTube while the unconferences can only be experienced by those who choose to attend. 

Here are highlights from a few unconferences I particularly enjoyed:

• Chill zone: Crafts, coloring, and calm. If you'd enjoy a moment to regulate, join us with the centering activity of your choosing.

  • Led by Rose Williams, longtime WTD organizer, lightning talk coordinator, and the organizer of other amazing unconference sessions like “WTD Meetup organizers hang out”, “Show us your pets!”, and “Interested in starting a WTD Meetup?”

  • Conferences and peopling can take a lot of you, especially if you are an introvert and just gave your first lightning talk.  I greatly appreciated the opportunity to doodle in my notebook while having a lovely conversation with Rose and Dennis Dawson, the incredible sketchnoter and human being I met at this WTD. 

• Neurodiversi-Tea

  • Led by Ryan Macklin, a prolific speaker at WTD events and good human being who you might remember from such talks as “So you need to give bad news to users…” and recent lightning talk from Portland “People are never logical”.

  • This was a vulnerable and intimate session that I greatly appreciated. I was really excited to learn that there is a #neurodiversity channel in the WTD Slack. 

• Women in tech

  • I guess this was sort of led by me, as I was sitting in an empty unconference to hopefully connect with more attendees. In true unconference format, Chryssy Joski jumped in and invited others to continue the conversation about “Women in tech”.

  • This unconference stemmed from her lightning talk that day: Chryssy Joski - The Power of Pink: Women in Technology.

Lightning Talks

Lightning talks last no longer than 5 minutes and are open to both new and experienced speakers. In fact, WTD actively encourages first-time speakers to use the lightning talk format to practice public speaking! These talks can be about any intriguing idea or concept that the speaker would like to highlight in a short and sweet manner.

Lightning talks are absolutely my favorite part of Write the Docs. I can literally say WTD Lightning Talks changed my life. During our company trip to Write the Docs Prague back in 2018, I learned how to do cryptic crosswords, and Pete and I now do them every night during dinner. 

I've personally being working on getting outside of my comfort zone and doing things that scare me. I'm pretty terrified of public speaking, but I figured there was no better place to try my first lightning talk. 

Here are a few of the many lightning talks our team enjoyed at WTD Atlantic:

• Jeanine Abuahmad - Returning after Maternity Leave

  • It was super inspiring to see Jeanine give a talk with all the chaos and realities of parenting an infant in view.

• Kenzie Woodbridge - Valuing You (Accurately and Completely)

  • Such a good reminder that we all have value to bring to work even on our least productive days. Thank you, Kenzie!

• Dennis Dawson - Liven Up Your Videos with Doodly

  • Dennis is an accomplished sketchnotes artist. Here are the sketchnotes he created at WTD 2023!

• Marybeth Alexander - 25-hour Workweek

  • This was my first lightning talk! It was about the backstory and benefits to KnowledgeOwl’s 25-hour work week. Hoot! 🦉

KnowledgeOwl Sponsorship and Promotion

We had a lot of fun with our sponsorship for Write the Docs Atlantic. Here's some of the fun we had:

• As a Published sponsor, we got 7 tickets. 5 of them when to our owls and we shared 2 of them with special members of the larger KnowledgeOwl community. We showed up in force this year!
• Veronica created a fun welcome video for our sponsor expo booth. 
• We ran a special promotion for new customers. You can still sign up for KnowledgeOwl’s special "Friend of Write the Docs" account and get 2 authors for the price of 1.
• Chad created limited edition KnowledgeOwl <> Write the Docs stickers which we are snail mailing to friends we met.
• With the help of Rose, I created and led a Writing Day project called The Blog Writing Room.
• I gave my first lightning talk on our 25-hour work week!
• I ran our sponsor expo booth and made a bunch of new friends in the Write the Docs community.
• I embraced the Snowball Rule and made sure that I met 7 new people each day. 
• It's always fun to hear our company thanked during the event and see our logo up on the screen. We are quite proud to be continuing to sponsor and grow our sponsorship for WTD over the years!

How to Stay Involved with Write the Docs

• Join the Write the Docs Slack

• Subscribe to the Write the Docs Newsletter

• Attend Write the Docs Meetups

• Attend future Write the Docs Conferences

Attending Write the Docs Atlantic 2023 was an enriching experience. Our parliament commends the WTD team for working hard to host this virtual community event. We look forward to attending many more virtual and in-person Write the Docs conferences in the future! Hoot!