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