Comprehensive introduction to Write the Docs documentation community

Write the Docs is a global community of people who care about documentation.

You’re probably interested in this community because you’re either a professional technical writer, a software developer, a customer support professional, or simply an individual who cares about documentation.

Anyone who cares about docs is a documentarian. 

Introduction to Write the Docs

What does it mean to be a community? It means a group of people with a shared interest, goal or values who have relationships with each other. The community gathers in certain places and it is a social group. We choose our communities.

Write the Docs has two main facets: the online communities and the real-life meetups, events and conferences. Write the Docs has events that take place around the world and operates on an open source model. This means anyone can join and start contributing to Write the Docs.

The primary goals of Write the Docs is to promote the importance of documentation, bring together the community, and encourage the spread of good docs. These goals suffuse the activities and communications of Write the Docs. It’s a wonderful community to be part of.

We’ve published a previous brief introduction to Write the Docs.

Why be a part of Write the Docs

Write the Docs is an inclusive community. This means the community takes active, sustained and sincere steps to welcome all kinds of individuals – regardless of any perceived difference.

Image source: Flickr by Write the Docs. License: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

This is because anyone at all can care about documentation, and you don’t have to prove your worth to become part of Write the Docs. All you have to do is follow the Code of Conduct and be a decent human.

Swapnil Ogale is a Technical Communicator and organizer of Write the Docs Australia meetup. He says, “Write the Docs has become the tribe that I yearned to be a part of for years while working as a sole tech writer.

“It has given me tremendous opportunities to organise, meet, speak/present and talk to so many people with varied backgrounds, yet all of them love how content and documentation shapes a product/service/app.”

Senior Technical Writer Margaret Eker says, "I discovered Write the Docs at my last job at Rackspace. I wrote a blog post about how Write the Docs inspired our team while we transformed our docs and doc process to a collaborative model based on open source tools."

If you’re looking for your first technical writing job or for a new opportunity, they also have a job board.

History of Write the Docs conference and community

Troy Howard, Eric Redmond and Eric Holscher founded Write the Docs after they realized there was no community for documentation writers. It was one of those ideas that developed by accident, as the byproduct of an organic need.

There was an existing community of documentarians in their hometown of Portland, although it never called itself such – or even recognized itself.

The two Erics and Troy had their first meetup, came up with a crazy idea for a conference, and decided to take things online.

They say:

“There exists a tribe of documentarians in the world. Up until this point, they haven’t had a central place to meet each other, and coalesce into a community. We are providing the space to allow this to happen, both in person and online.”

They set up their initial landing page and posted a link to Hacker News, expecting a few dozen sign ups for their conference – mostly developers from Portland.

Instead, hundreds of people from everywhere expressed their interest, from developers, to designers, to startups. They had to increase the conference capacity from less than 100 to selling out a 250-capacity venue.

Write the Docs was born.

How to get involved

You can physically attend a conference or a meetup if there is one local to your area, or you’re willing to travel. There are also numerous platforms online where documentarians congregate and discuss all things documentation.

We’ll discuss the various routes to participation and how you can get the most out of Write the Docs.

Conferences

Image source: Flickr by Write the Docs. License: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

If you live in an area – or are willing to travel to – where Write the Docs hosts a conference, you can grab yourself a ticket and attend in person. Here is the full list of current and past conferences.

If you attend a conference, we recommend joining the Slack before hand and potentially connecting with a few folks you might like to connect with while there.

At the moment, Write the Docs has conferences in:

• Portland, United States
• Prague, Czech Republic
• Melbourne, Australia
• Cincinnati, United States

A conference is a lot of work so at the moment they are only hosted in a limited number of locations. If you want Write the Docs to consider hosting a future conference nearer you, send them a message, and you never know what might happen!

Meetups

Write the Docs have regular meetups around the world. Their meetups take place in various cities in North America, as well as in London, Barcelona, Berlin, Brisbane, and Seoul, among others.

They’re organized by members of the community – as opposed to a top-down approach. This makes them informal, vibrant, personal, and somewhat ad hoc.

Each meetup is hosted as a local chapter so if there isn’t one in your area, you can always start one! It will automatically become part of Write the Docs.

Our very own wordsmith Catherine Heath is leading a meetup in Manchester, England – part of Write the Docs North.

KnowledgeOwl is proud to sponsor and host our local Boulder/Denver, Colorado meetup – run by Bri Hillmer and Marybeth Alexander.

Slack

Probably the fastest and easiest way to connect with the community is to join their very active Slack. We recommend subscribing to particular channels that interest you, and introducing yourself in the #intros channel so that you can get the most out of the experience.

Another good way to get involved on Slack is to Direct Message a few folks if you have something in common – perhaps you both worked for the same company, have an interest in the same niche topic, or they live in your area. This tactic can be less overwhelming than diving into the group chat straightaway.

Newsletter 

Sign up for the monthly newsletter and browse the archives for interesting information from and about the community. The newsletter distills some of the interesting discussions from elsewhere in a handy digest, as well as communicating important updates.

Twitter

Documentarians are active on Twitter! Follow the hashtag #writethedocs, and follow their twitter account along with other documentarians for 140 characters of documentation-based discussion.

The best way to get involved on Twitter is to observe the hashtag and posts, and interact with people’s posts and questions. You can start following some of the documentarians on there, and share your own insights or ask questions.

Podcast

Check out past podcast discussions and meetup recordings for documentation insights. They release a new podcast episode every month or so, and anyone can submit a new topic for consideration.

Resources

Conference Videos

Each year, the conference talks are filmed and shared online. Check out their amazing collection of videos on YouTube.

Documentation Guide

Check out the Documentation Guide, which “exists to provide both novice and expert writers a best practice handbook for building, structuring, and writing software documentation”.

There’s a huge range of topics to discover, including why docs are important, creating a documentation culture at your company, documentation tools and markup languages, as well as inspiration.

Write the Docs conferences

The conferences are the heart and soul of Write the Docs.

It’s great to participate online or through local meetups, but at the conferences you can experience the energy and vibrancy of the wider documentarian community. Prague and Portland have been going the longest, and have built up solid communities behind them.

At the conference, you can expect featured talks and lightning talks, conversations, an unconference, writing day, job opportunities and socials. It’s moderately priced compared to similar conferences, but also much smaller at around 600 attendees.

You’ll get to connect with people you may previously have only interacted with online, and also come away with brand new friends in the community. You’ll get ideas for your work and perhaps you’ll be brave enough to submit a lightning talk or unconference topic. We cannot stress enough what good value this conference is.

Portland conference 2018

If you’re getting increasingly devastated because you haven’t been able to attend Write the Docs yet, we have written up some of our favourite talks from WTD Portland 2018.

• Not the Docs: content and voice on a developer blog – Havi Hoffman
• Research like you’re wrong: Lessons from user research gone rogue – Jen Lambourne
• How to make your code examples in your documentation shine like Stripe – Larry Ullman
• Hiring junior technical writers who can contribute successfully to your team – Sarah Day
• Minimum Viable Documentation: the art of documentation triage – Neal Kaplan

Prague conference 2017

We also went to Write the Docs Prague 2017 and published a blog post about the experience. It includes write-ups of several talks.

Making the most of conferences

If you’re scared about attending a conference for the first time, nervous, unsure, or have had some bad experiences from other conferences, Write the Docs addresses these concerns successfully.

The conference has some amazing rules that when followed help foster a truly inclusive community.

To start with, the Code of Conduct is usually rigorously observed by attendees and organizers alike, while rule-breaking is dealt with swiftly and humanely. You will be safe and respected if you attend this conference.

Not only will you be safe, but also likely to thrive – partly based on the following rules.

The Pac-Man Rule

Conferences can easily become prey to the in-group phenomenon.

Over time, conferences become less and less welcoming to new folks. We tend to find it easier to socialize with people we already know rather than put in the effort to make new friends.

The Pac-Man rule addresses this tendency to ensure that you are able to meet new folks easily. The Pac-Man rule means:

“When standing as a group of people, always leave room for one person to join your group.”

This means you have to stand in a Pac-Man shape so that new people are always able to enter the group. It’s a lot less intimidating than trying to join a closed group, and sets the mindset that we should be consciously welcoming to new people. This atmosphere makes it really easy to make friends.

Community++

This is a more proactive rule which means that established folks are also motivated to meet new people.

Community++ means you have to meet the same number of new friends per day for every year you’ve attended the conference. If you’ve attended for one year, you only have to meet one person per day.

If you’ve attended five times before, that’s five new people a day!

Open source contributions

Write the Docs has been founded in the style of other open source communities – despite not being strictly aimed at developers.

True to form, they also have an active open source repository on GitHub, which means that the code for their website is open for contributions from the community.

If you’re a developer, you may already be familiar with the open source model and you can take a look at their open issues to see how you could help. Try to tackle an existing issue or submit your own for consideration.

If you’re new to open source and outside the world of programming, the best bet for you is to attend their Writing Day during one of the conferences. You’ll have the chance to contribute with group support.

Final remarks

Joining a community gives you opportunities for professional development, social connection, the ability to learn new things, and a chance to have lots of fun.

See what you can discover by joining Write the Docs and connecting with your fellow documentarians.

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