Write the Docs is a two-day conference focused on documentation systems, tech writing theory, and information delivery. It will be held on April 8-9 in Portland, Oregon.

Writing and maintaining documentation involves the talents of a multidisciplinary community of technical writers, designers, typesetters, developers, support teams, marketers, and many others.

This conference creates a time and a place for this community of documentarians to share information, discuss ideas, and work together to improve the art and science of documentation.

We invite all those who write the docs to spread the word:

Docs or it didn't happen!

Our meetup site.

NOTE: We'll be in New Relic's newest meeting room, on the 27th floor

The Write The Docs NA conference returns to Portland in May, and the deadline for proposals is February 10 (midnight PST).

For the third year, we'll give people who want to propose a chance to test things out, either by speaking briefly, or by brainstorming their proposals.

FYI, O'Reilly has an excellent guide to creating conference proposals, "Propose, Prepare, Present". If you navigate to http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920027096.do, you can get the eBook version for free.

We'll start with a brief networking session from 6-6:30.

At 6:30, I'll make a few announcements. Anyone who wants to try out a "preview" of a conference talk (5-10 min), or just present their draft proposal for comments, can speak to the group (or ask questions) after that.

Wacom -- a company which develops Pen Input hardware -- needed a user help system to move beyond static PDFs. Their solution was to separate product-specific PDFs into a series of, mostly common, HTML topic pages. These HTML file were, in turn, processed into a web deliverable package via Python scripting.

The solution is complex, as the Wacom system includes interrelationships between 150+ topics across over 30 products and 14 languages.

The solution required “a more technical Tech Writer” -- as it required knowledge of HTML
Python
JavaScript
Excel Macros

Wacom implemented their solution by integrating their tech writer in their Engineering team. They also included a dedicated engineering resource to support design and development of their technical docs.

Speaker: Arthur Krebsbach, Windows Software Engineer

Save the date! We'll give people who are scheduled to speak at the Write The Docs 2017 conference a chance to rehearse their talks.

With tens of millions of items in its collections, Internet Archive is one of the largest libraries in the world. It provides free and open access to all of its materials to anyone with an internet connection, making it a treasure trove for researchers, historians, and curious individuals.

Of course, having a collection that large doesn’t help anyone if it’s difficult to access. To help with this, Internet Archive has released a number of open APIs and tools to allow people to upload and download items, as well as data mine the metadata for the entire collection.

In this session we will:

Give you a tour of Internet Archive and its collections
Introduce you to the APIs and tools you can use to access and contribute to the Archive
* Show examples of how other people and institutions are using the Archive

Speaker Bio:

In VM (aka Vicky)'s nearly 20 years in the tech industry she has been an analyst, programmer, product manager, software engineering manager, director of software engineering, and C-level technical business and open source strategy consultant. Vicky is the winner of the Perl White Camel Award (2014) and the O'Reilly Open Source Award (2016).

Vicky occasionally blogs at http://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com, often writes and is a community moderator for opensource.com, and frequently tweets at @vmbrasseur.

It’s understood that great documentation is essential to use software properly, but in a world with ever-changing specifications and hot new features, how can documentation remain fresh and easily accessible? We’ll discuss how New Relic has approached this, from the process of making sure the latest correct information is available, to updating the interface to make it easy for users to find exactly what they’re looking for, to analyzing our users’ habits and feedback to provide necessary tools and updates in the future.

We’ll take a stroll down memory lane to visit some of the early layouts of the documentation site,  and we’ll discuss the present iteration of the site and the UI changes that were made and why. We’ll also look into the future and provide a glimpse into what we can expect from the site in the months to come.

Speaker: Phil Mills
Software Engineer
Customer Success Enablement Team

Abstract

Many technical writers and documentarians benefit immensely after attending relevant conferences. These events offer networking opportunities, access to Subject Matter Experts, and impetus to pursue novel solutions to work conundrums.

The annual Write the Docs conferences offer glimpses of what is possible in my work environment. After Write the Docs NA 2017 event, I initiated several new projects/processes to elevate the state of internal communication, raise awareness for customer-facing documents, and organize tech communication community at work. The initial results have been encouraging.

We’ll explore how ideas from past and present Write the Docs events have acted as catalysts to overcome challenges and obstacles. We’ll also discuss why the conference is relevant for tech writers, regardless of their industry affiliations.

Bio

Mo Nishiyama is a Technical Writer at Oregon Health & Science University’s Information Technology Group. His professional passions include transforming dense engineer-speak into customer-friendly support articles, cultivating a community of tech writers in the workplace, promoting a human-centric work culture, and sharing career/life experiences through public speaking.

NOTE: This will be a 90 minute *workshop*, and we may stay as late as 8:30 pm.

This workshop is an introduction to writing about identity in technology. Taught by the editor of The Responsible Communication Style Guide, this workshop covers how to write effectively, efficiently, and appropriately about topics tied to individuals' identities, including accessibility, gendered terms, and pronouns. It also covers how a style guide can be an effective part of the workflow when creating and promoting technology projects (including open source), writing documentation, and even developing software.

Bio: Thursday Bram is the editor of The Responsible Communication Style Guide. She writes about intersectional feminism, cryptocurrencies, kitchen sinks, and anything else that catches her interest. She organizes conferences, sticker swaps, and potluck dinners on a regular basis. You can find Thursday online at ThursdayBram.com.

The Write The Docs NA conference returns to Portland in May. The call for proposals (http://www.writethedocs.org/conf/portland/2018/) was announced recently, and the deadline for proposals is January 10 (midnight PST).

For the fourth year, we'll give people who want to propose a chance to test things out, either by speaking briefly, or by brainstorming their proposals.

FYI, O'Reilly has an excellent guide to creating conference proposals, "Propose, Prepare, Present". If you navigate to http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920027096.do , you can get the eBook version for free.

We'll start with a brief networking session from 6-6:30. Note: Food will not be provided, but is available for order. At 6:30, I'll make a few announcements --

Anyone who wants to try out a "preview" of a conference talk (5-10 min), or just present their draft proposal for comments, can speak to the group (or ask questions) after that.

Join us to play a fun game that answers relevant writing questions with the hive mind, share highlights from the recent Write the Docs Portland 2018 conference, and enjoy light refreshments in a friendly and inclusive atmosphere.

Meetup information: https://www.meetup.com/Write-The-Docs-PDX/events/250814073/

Join us for this month's meetup and explore the topic of translation. Documentarian and translator Amy Coulter will lead us through the process of buying translations.

"Can't we just run this through Google Translate? Can't my colleague translate that, isn't she from that country? Can we just lob this over the fence to a big LSP and be done with it? Can we find a freelancer ASAP?
Local editor, translator and writer Amy Coulter will be happy to answer all of these questions for you (and more), giving you some tools for tackling a translation-related action item."

Join us for light refreshments and conversation. Please arrive by 6:15 as the doors lock after that time.

Erin Grace and David Bastedo had a chance to attend the Support Driven Expo conference in June and will be here to share their experiences and what they learned. Support Driven Expo is a conference that brings together customer support professionals to learn from each other and share best practices through talks, workshops, and unconferences. Learn more about how documentation plays a role in customer support and other trends in the support community.

Join us for light refreshments and conversation. Please arrive by 6:15 as the doors lock after that time.

We'd like to welcome Portland Accessibility and User Experience group (@pdxa11yux) as we host a joint meetup/workshop for writing more inclusively.

We’ll share inclusivity guidelines and tips, then break into groups and apply and share what we’ve learned. Together, we’ll uncover solutions to make your writing more inclusive. Please bring any burning accessibility comments or questions and any samples of relevant work you'd be willing to share and discuss.

Write the Docs Portland meetup, Portland State University's Technical Communication group, and PDX Support Driven meetup are combining forces for a very fascinating look into the lives of documentarians, Technical Writing students, and support professionals.

We'll have two members from each group share with attendees what their work day is like. After the "Day in the Life of..." stories, we have an opportunity to ask presenters questions and form breakout groups where attendees can converse with others based on common topics of interest.

Join us on Tuesday, October 16th, from 6 to 8 pm. Location: Smith Memorial Student Union building, meeting space room 333 (building map here: https://www.pdx.edu/student-union/building-directory#Third%20Floor)

Our December meetup features a presentation by Mike Jang (Senior Staff Technical Writer at ForgeRock), as well as several very important announcements for the community. You don't want to miss this!

Here's a teaser for Mike's presentation, "Minimum Viable Documentation for RESTful APIs":

To paraphrase a James Bond movie, "Swagger is not enough..."

...You've done the work to set up OpenAPI specification REST calls for your APIs (Inaccurately known as "Swagger"). You have reference information. But you discover that few users are actually trying REST calls on your system. You're wondering: "What else do I need?"

This presentation will describe the Minimal Viable Documentation (MVD) for RESTful APIs, also known as "What do I need for my developer portal?"

Based loosely on Kristof Van Tomme's presentations on Developer Experience, Mike will describe the MVD for a developer portal, what will help your developers try out your APIs.

Our January meetup (1/8/19, 6-8 pm at Jama Software) is an opportunity for members to share potential ideas for the Write the Docs Portland 2019 (May 19-21). Participants are encouraged to give short (~5 minutes) dry runs of potential presentations to gauge interest and collect feedback. Do you have a burning idea that you want to present at the conference? Here is your chance to share them. We'll also brainstorm topics that attendees would "love to see at the conference that they wish someone would offer."

If you have a talk in mind, please RSVP and let the organizers (Mo, Kristen McKee, and Mike Jang) know in advance. We would love to have several speakers share their proposals.

With Call for Proposals for the Write the Docs Portland 2019 conference quickly approaching (midnight, January 17th), this is a great opportunity to practice your talk and receive feedback. For what it's worth, several past participants of the Conference Submission Workshop were selected to present at Write the Docs.

We look forward to seeing you and hearing your ideas on January 8th!

Our February meetup will feature several short-length Lightning Talks by Write the Docs Portland community members. Instead of a full-length feature presentation, these Lightning Talks are short, focused topics that are about 5-10 minutes long.

Our presentations include: Kristen McKee: "UX RedUX: Words are design" Mo Nishiyama: "Docs of Ages: Lessons Learned in Evolving Support Articles" And others to be announced.

Our next Write the Docs Portland meetup is on Tuesday, April 9th, at Jama Software. And we have an exclusive! We'll have an opportunity to hear one of the sixteen presentations that was selected for Write the Docs 2019 Portland conference!

Mike Jang will preview the "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Command Line" talk. The command line is not something that is to be feared, but an essential tool that can greatly aid software documentation.

For those who were unable to attend Write the Docs Portland conference in May, here's an opportunity to learn about attendees' experiences. And for those who attended the conference, here's an opportunity to reflect.

Each year, Write the Docs conference presents opportunities for community members to learn about challenges, experiences, problem-solving methods, and writing philosophies of fellow documentarians. Many folks in this community attend and participate at the conference.

Join us for a facilitated discussion where we reflect and share learnings from the May conference.

Hello Documentarians!

For the month of August, we're having a low-key, good old fashioned informal social. We're going to meet at Laughing Planet in NW Portland (very close to Beaverton), grab a table, and share our experiences as documentarians.

We've heard your survey feedback about your venue and date preferences, and we're going to try having community meetups in a variety of settings. For the month of August, we're going to meet in the westside--closer to Beaverton and Hillsboro.

Hello Portland (Oregon)-area documentarians! For September, we're going to have a Lean Coffee meetup (9/18 at Jama Software). Based on http://agilecoffee.com/leancoffee/, we'll leave the discussion up to you. As noted on the site, “Lean Coffee is a structured, but agenda-less meeting. Participants gather, build an agenda, and begin talking. Conversations are directed and productive because the agenda for the meeting was democratically generated.”

New to Lean Coffee? It's a great way to have real, focused dialogue and we often discuss matters of docs, agile, lean, and such - but anything goes.

Are you new to the philosophy of Documentation as Code (Docs as Code) and want to learn more? Do you want to learn from an experienced practitioner who has implemented Docs as Code in real-life? Are you interested in learning the benefits of Docs as Code?

Join us at Write the Docs Portland November meetup, as Documentarian Amy Qualls discusses these topics and more! A case study will be shared.

With the deadline for Write the Docs Portland 2020 quickly approaching on 1/10/20, this is a great opportunity to share your proposal ideas, conjure ideas for proposals, and support our fellow Documentarians who are submitting proposals. As Portland community has numerous past speakers and conference volunteers, this is a great opportunity to ask questions about the conference proceedings and the submission process. Plus it is a chance to reconnect after the holiday season!

This is an low-key, informal event at Laughing Planet (near Portland State University).

Additional information about the Call for Proposals is available here: https://www.writethedocs.org/conf/portland/2020/cfp/

KCS (Knowledge-Centered Support) is a methodology that brings together support and writing. In that spirit, February's meetup is a collaboration between the Write the Docs and Support Driven communities.

We'll hear Jack Harrison-Sherlock present on how Vend implemented KCS to a global team of 60 spread across 3 offices, doubling their self-service rate and empowering their team to contribute to a single knowledge base. Jack is the Senior Continuous Improvement Lead in the Support Operations team at Vend, where he owns the Support platform/tech and manages special projects.

• 6:30 to 7:00 Networking
• 7:00 Presentation

Joint Meetup with the Agile Mob Programming Workshop and Write the Docs

Mob programming is a collaborative way to leverage the strength of the collective developers to solve problems and produce code with results that can be greater than the work of the individual participants alone. But can mobbing work for tech writers? Join us in this social experiment to apply mob programming principles to writing documentation.

Mobbing works on the constraints created by the group. For this joint meetup, participants will be 100% remote.To join the meetup, please RSVP at Meetup link, and we’ll post a meeting link here on the day of the event.

As a group, we will be presented with a writing challenge. With these constraints, and any further agreements we make, we’ll use collaborative online tools to explore the benefits and challenges of docs mobbing.

Join us at the annual supermeetup for Write the Docs Portland and Portland State University Technical Writers' group on Wednesday 10/21/20. New tech writers and those who are curious about what others are doing are all welcome! #writethedocs

The annual PDX Annual October Tech Writing Supermeetup returns, with the topic of "Maintaining Inclusion in a Remote Atmosphere". The topic will be presented by Zhou Fang and Betzabe Villareal from Portland Women in Tech (PDXWIT) organization. The Supermeetup will be hosted virtually on Zoom platform.

The schedule for the Supermeeting is as follows: 5:30 - Start meeting (general networking) 6:00 - "Maintaining Inclusion in a Remote Atmosphere" presentation by Zhou Fang and Betzabe Villareal 6:30 - Questions and Answers

When: Wed., October 20, 2021, 5:30-7:00pm (Pacific Time)

The PDX Annual October Tech Writing Supermeetup is brought to you by Write the Docs PDX, PDX UX Writing, and PSU Technical Communications Meetup.

https://www.meetup.com/Write-The-Docs-PDX/events/28136330

Note: This is information for the IN-PERSON event. For online event, refer to the companion Meetup event: https://www.meetup.com/write-the-docs-pdx/events/288931028/

Location: Portland State University campus, Fariborz Maseeh Hall (FMH) Room 319 (English Department)

The annual PDX Annual October Tech Writing Supermeetup returns, with the topic of Burnout to Rejuvenation: Taking care of ourselves and reimagining possibilities.

During the event, we will share experiences and ideas from several Tech Writing professionals who have navigated the past few years working in remote, hybrid, and in-person environments. Special emphasis will be on actions taken by presenters to address work burnout, self-care, and rethinking work processes.

In-person pizza will be served!

As a way into the topic, we recommend reading the article: The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives: https://nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/end-burnout-work-drains-us-build-better-lives-bookbite/32042/

The PDX Annual October Tech Writing Supermeetup is brought to you by Write the Docs PDX and PSU Technical Communications Meetup.

Write the Docs is a global community of people who care about documentation: Programmers, Tech Writers, Customer Support, Designers, Project Managers, Developer Advocates, and anyone else who wants people to have a great experience with software.

Created in 2013 in Portland, Oregon, WTD has hosted conferences around the world in Prague, Sydney, Amsterdam, London, and Melbourne.

We invite you to our Portland conference to join 400 other attendees to explore the art and science of documentation!