Blog - Posts tagged portland-2020

Conference highlights and thanks to the community!

2020-08-20T00:00:00Z

Hey everyone,

The Write the Docs team is now emerging from the post-conference recovery period, and we wanted to send out a quick message to thank everyone for helping to make our 1st online conference such a success. We’re happy to share some of the highlights with you.

Conference recap

At over 600 people this year’s conference was our biggest yet! We had the usual mix of main stage and lightning talks, unconference sessions, writing sprints, and social events. We were very happy with how well all of our events transitioned to our new online format. We loved how the spirit of the community was so palpable even in an online event, which was even more special given the year we’ve all had.

Overall, we were excited with how our awesome community come together in our new venue. Lots of knowledge was shared, and we had a great time.

Videos

Videos of the talks are now available on our YouTube playlist. Sadly, the Monday afternoon talks had an issue with the Q&A not being recorded, so we weren’t able to add those to the videos. We think we know what happened with it, and hopefully we’ve addressed this issue going forward.

Thanks to Bart at Work for doing such a great job with these. You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss any future content!

Shirts still on sale

If you want a souvenir from this year’s conference, our Write the Docs Portland 2020 Pop-Up Shop is still open! We have loose and fitted options from different fabrics, and you can choose exactly the size and cut you want.

The campaign will run in 3-day batches until August 30th. Shipping is available from the USA or Europe.

Code of Conduct transparency report

As with any Write the Docs event, this conference was covered by our community Code of Conduct. We aim to be as transparent with CoC incidents and enforcement as we can.

To ensure that our CoC was visible and accessible, we took a number of specific steps:

Every participant agreed to the Code of Conduct in advance during registration.
The CoC, or a summary, was included on the conference website and Hopin Reception
The CoC was repeatedly mentioned in our conference introduction and announcements.
We specifically stressed that the CoC applies to all conference spaces including the social event.
We encouraged all attendees to report any incident, even if they were not sure whether it was a violation.

None of our organizers were approached about any CoC concerns at this event. We know that this is, in part, a reflection of the thoughtful and inclusive community that we’re so lucky to have.

That being said, we’re also very conscious of the fact that just because nothing was reported doesn’t mean nothing happened. If there was any personal conduct or other aspect of the conference experience that did not meet the expectations of behavior set out in the CoC, please email us at conduct@writethedocs.org.

Ready for more?

Don’t forget our Prague conference in October, and our Australia+India conference in December. Tickets are on sale for Prague. The call for talk proposals for the Australia conference is still open, and ticket sales are open.

Our Prague and Australia+India conferences are also virtual this year, so you can attend or present from anywhere. They take place during the day in the CEST and AEDT time zones, respectively.

Our Slack network has expanded yet again this year. Our #general Slack channel has been extra busy in the days and weeks leading up to the conference, and we hope that y’all continue the conversations throughout the year. If you haven’t joined, now’s the time! Check out the Write the Docs Slack.

We’re also looking for more sponsors to make our other events just as magical as this year’s Portland event. You can see all our sponsorship options on our website.

Thanks again

We’re so grateful to our sponsors, speakers, volunteers, and attendees for making this conference possible. Whether you were able to come out this time or not, we hope to see you again next year – or even sooner at one of our other events!

Tickets Selling Out Soon and Welcome Wagon Guide

2020-07-31T00:00:00Z

Hey everyone!

We’re just over a week away from the start of the conference, and we’re getting excited to invite you into our online venue for 3 days of content, collaboration, and conversation. Tickets are going to sell out in the next couple of days, so if you’ve been on the fence, now is the time to buy one!

We have done our internal testing of the platform, and we’re getting everything ready for prime time. As part of our internal testing, we’ve built out the Welcome Wagon Guide. This guide is our attempt to make sure that you get the most out of our events, and we’ve totally rewritten it for our online event.

Welcome Wagon Guide

Each year we create a guide to help our attendees get the most out of the conference. This year, we’re all first-timers at an online event, so we’ve totally rewritten our Welcome Wagon guide to help you get the most out of our event this year.

We have a lot of information about how to use Hopin, and lots of tips and tricks for the best way to plan your days. We’ve taken all the transit and travel information out, but please do plan to spend a large part of your day with us from the comfort of your own home.

Tickets will sell out soon

We wanted to let you know that we expect tickets to sell out by August 4th. We’ve increased the capacity for this years event past the 500 from previous years, but we still want to make sure the event keeps its manageable size and feel. If you were hoping to come to this years event, we recommend that you get your tickets soon.

Once we sell out our tickets, we plan to send everyone a link to access the Hopin event. We plan to send this out mid next week, to give everyone a few days to work through any troubleshooting issues that you might encounter. The Hopin access links will be sent to all Ti.to ticketholders, so monitor your inbox next week for a message. If you don’t get an email from us by the end of next week, please email us and we’ll help you out! Once you’ve got your Hopin ticket, you will be ready to get started on Sunday morning with the Writing Day!

Thanks so much to all our sponsors

We are so grateful to have our sponsors help in bringing these events to life every year. You’ll be able to chat with most of our sponsors at the Job Fair, and a few will have booths for conversations the entire conference.

Thanks so much to the following companies for supporting the Portland conference this year:

Microsoft

Google

Redocly

Splunk

Slack

Cloud Native Computing Foundation

twilio

Mozilla

Salesforce

MongoDB

We’re excited to see all of you soon, and can’t wait to share a wonderful few days with you in our online space.

The Write the Docs team

Announcing Full Schedule

2020-07-17T00:00:00Z

Hey everyone!

We’re less than a month away from the first ever online Portland conference and we’re working hard to make sure it’ll be as welcoming and as fun as the in-person event you’re probably familiar with.

Today we’re announcing the full presentation schedule and the platform we’ll be hosting the conference on. We are working on last-minute details for a few more activities during the conference, so look out for more information in our next mailing.

Conference platform

The conference will be held on https://hopin.to/, which not only provides a stage for our amazing speakers, but also has integrated chat, unconference rooms with breakout calls, expo booths, and impromptu 1-on-1 meetings. We’re updating our Welcome Wagon guide, to be released soon, so it’ll all feel familiar before you’ve even arrived.

Full presentation schedule

The conference website is now updated with the talk schedule for the main stage presentations, so you can start planning your time (and getting excited!) for the conference. We’re excited to have live Q&A after most talks, which will come from your questions but be moderated by an MC.

Start thinking about Writing Day

Our pre-conference Writing Day will happen on Sunday, and it is much more fun when folks come with their own projects in mind!

If you have a project or are part of a community that you think would benefit from a writing sprint, start brainstorming now about what you might want to focus on. If you’d like us to include your project on the Writing Day page, drop us an email at portland@writethedocs.org. Or just show up on Sunday ready to introduce your project!

Shirts on sale

The Write the Docs Portland 2020 Pop-Up Shop is still open! We have loose and fitted options from different fabrics, and you can choose exactly the size and cut you want.

The campaign will run in 3-day batches until August 30th. Shipping is available from the USA or Europe. However, due to the global shipping situation, we recommend you order your shirt at least 2 weeks in advance if you want to sport your new threads during the conference.

All our events and activities

Write the Docs is more than a conference. Every year we make sure to have a variety of activities that our attendees can enjoy, whether you want to learn something, meet new people, or share knowledge. And even though this years conference is held online, we’re holding to that plan.

Lightning Talks. We’ll have lightning talks each day after lunch. These are 5 minute presentations and a lot of fun. They can be about anything you want, this is your chance to share something you are passionate about with the audience. Slides are not required.
Unconference. We’ll be running the Unconference all day Monday and on Tuesday afternoon. Want to chat with like-minded folks about a specific thing? This is the place.
Job Fair. As with the previous few years, on Tuesday morning we’ll have a job fair where you can find your next documentarian friendly job.
Badge Flair Contest. We’re working on adapting this to the new format. Details will be posted as soon as we have them.
Social event. On Monday night the conference platform will become the social event space. The main stage will be closed, the main focus will be attendee-created sessions. You’re welcome to create sessions for board games, trivia quizzes, karaoke, or any other social activity that you want to share with your fellow documentarians.
Conference Help Desk. If you have any questions about navigating the virtual event, we’ll be running the Write the Docs Helpdesk booth, where you can chat with one of the organizers and the Welcome Wagon team.

The Schedule page has the latest and most complete information about all our events. This is where we will also update any changes/cancellations if they should occur.

Thanks so much for all your support and enthusiasm so far – we’re so excited to see you all next month!

The Write the Docs team

Announcing ticket sales for the Portland virtual conference

2020-05-26T00:00:00Z

We’re excited to announce that tickets are on sale for our Portland virtual conference. More details will be coming soon, but we’re enthusiastic about the accessibility benefits of the new format, and can’t wait to try out a few new ideas this year.

Get your ticket for the conference

The Portland conference will be held online on Aug 9-11, 2020. The full event website is live, with some preliminary details, and we’ll be filling in more as it gets closer.

If you’re excited too, go ahead and register for your ticket now! We aren’t sure exactly what capacity we will be able to hold for the virtual event, but we might still sell out to make sure we’re providing a manageable event size for our attendees, as always.

We’re still working out all the details for our virtual event, but know that we’re going to keep as much as possible of the spirit of the event alive:

Excellent single track of presentations – now with moderated Q&A at the end!
Writing Day
Unconference sessions
Job Fair
Sponsor booths
A virtual hallway track
A social event of some kind, bring your own beverage and snacks :)

We really want to make sure that folks can get value from being at the event at the same time, and we think it will be another great year of helping our community connect.

Grant program

We updated our grant program application to take into account the virtual format of the event. We’re excited to be able to offer free tickets to a larger number of people this year, since there are now minimal other costs to attend the event.

You can apply by June 5th, 2020, Midnight PST on our website.

Update: the grant program application deadline has moved to July 1st, 2020.

Support our community by sponsoring

Every year we are fortunate to have the support of like-minded organizations and communities, who believe in the collaborative and welcoming community spirit and help us make our events great.

We have drafted a new virtual sponsorship prospectus for the conference, and are open for new sponsorship inquiries.

We are so grateful to have our sponsors help in bringing these events to life every year. Thanks sincerely to the following companies for supporting the Write the Docs community:

Microsoft

Google

Redocly

Splunk

Slack

Cloud Native Computing Foundation

twilio

Mozilla

Salesforce

MongoDB

We will still run the job fair, helping documentarians and organizations connect with each other. Check out the sponsorship prospectus for more details and to reserve your spot today.

Looking forward to seeing you all here soon, even though we won’t be in person!

The Write the Docs Team

Announcing virtual conference dates and ticket sales

2020-05-14T00:00:00Z

As we announced, Write the Docs Portland 2020 will be a virtual conference.

We decided to keep the dates as previously announced: the writing day is on Sunday, August 9, 9am-5pm PST, and the main conference days are on Monday/Tuesday, August 10-11, 9am-5pm PST.

Ticket sales will re-open on Monday, May 25th. Check out the tickets page for prices. Your virtual ticket includes:

Live streaming of all talks (available for ticket-holders only)
Q&A with speakers after each talk (may not be available for all speakers)
Access to the conference chat with all other attendees, speakers and sponsors
Access to the writing day
The virtual job fair

If you have chosen to convert your previously bought ticket into a virtual pass, or a pre-order for the virtual Portland 2020 conference, you will receive further details by e-mail within the next week.

We are aiming to include all our speakers in the virtual conference, but still confirming their availability.

Our opportunity grant will also re-open together with ticket sales in a modified format. Details will be published next week.

Sponsorship update

We have drafted a new online sponsorship prospectus for the conference. We are hoping our existing sponsors will be excited about the new benefits, and are open to new sponsorship requests for this event.

We are so grateful to have our sponsors help in bringing these events to life every year. Thanks sincerely to the following companies for supporting the Write the Docs community:

Microsoft

Google

Redocly

Splunk

Slack

Cloud Native Computing Foundation

twilio

Mozilla

Salesforce

MongoDB

And that’s the latest on the Portland conference. We hope you’re all getting as excited as we are! Stay tuned for more details.

The Write the Docs Team

Write the Docs 2020 conferences going virtual

2020-04-29T00:00:00Z

Hello everyone,

We hope that you’re holding up during these trying times. We are all stuck at home, but still thinking about our docs community :)

Due to the global events and travel restrictions, which are not expected to relax in the near future, we concluded that we must cancel our on-site Portland and Prague conferences this year. Even if the official travel and event restrictions will be relaxed by the scheduled dates, the safety of the community and everyone else comes first, so we are converting the conferences to online-only virtual events with an adjusted format.

The Portland virtual conference will be held in August, exact dates will be announced soon. The Prague virtual conference will be held in the Autumn, exact dates and Call for Proposals announcement will be announced in early summer.

Your Portland conference ticket

If you currently have a ticket to Write the Docs Portland, your options are:

Pre-order a ticket to the online event for 25% and get a refund for the remaining 75% of your original ticket amount.
Convert your existing ticket into a virtual ticket pass, valid for all of our online events until the end of 2021. We plan to move Portland & Prague online this year at least, and offer similar online events next year. Support the Write the Docs organization by helping us cover operating expenses for the next year and a half.
Get a full refund of your original ticket amount on May 15th, 2020. This option will happen automatically if you don’t select either of the previous options.

Please fill in the ticket processing form to let us know which option you prefer.

We’ll be reaching out to all of our sponsors to talk about moving their sponsorship to our online event, and we are excited about offering new sponsorship benefits available thanks to the new format.

What format will the online event have?

We’re looking at ways to keep the spirit of our events in a virtual format, so that the event will act as a gathering place for the community.

Writing Day, where the community works on projects and learns from each other. These will work well remotely.
Unconference, where our community has discussions and shares ideas. We think our Slack network already approximates this pretty well, but we’ll be adding a little extra structure and moderation during the event to help keep the discussions productive and friendly.
Presentations, where we share ideas, insights, and best practices. We’re investigating live and pre-recorded options, with curated and real-time Q&A with speakers and other experts.
Job Fair, matching attendees to sponsors and jobs. We’ll be building on our Job Board, offering our sponsors the ability to showcase the work they’re doing and the roles they’re hiring for.
Unfortunately, our Hike or Boat Ride can’t be done online, but we’d love it if you go out and enjoy a small bit of your local woods or water, at socially responsible distances, on our behalf, and share your pictures or videos with the community.

Let’s make the most out of the “new normal”

We are sad not to be able to have our upcoming events in person, but there are some great benefits to converting the events to an online format. The biggest benefit is accessibility to the event itself, since people who haven’t been able to travel to our events will be able to speak and attend the virtual events, making the events more accessible to everyone. The lower ticket price will also help more people from all walks of life attend the event.

We’re working hard on putting something in your calendar to get excited about, and we’re doing the same thing we always do, facilitating knowledge sharing and social connections within our community.

Stay tuned and take care of yourselves and your loved ones,

The Write the Docs Team

COVID-19 Update 03 - New Portland Conference Dates

2020-03-18T00:00:00Z

Hey Folks,

We hope that you’re doing okay. It’s been a stressful few weeks, and we wanted to send positive thoughts as we all attempt to get through this. Please let us know if there is anything we can do to help you.

The true power of community comes in the most trying of times. It’s been amazing watching folks come together on Slack, and we’re trying to plan more ways for folks to feel connected and supported.

We also wanted to give you an update on the Portland conference. We have a new date, August 9-11, 2020.

Given all the uncertainty about the future, we are being cautious in our approach with the conference. We’re announcing the new date so that people can mark it on their calendars, but we’re waiting to open ticket sales again until we are certain that the event can proceed. We recommend that you not book new travel until we open ticket sales again.

We know that changing the conference dates means that not everyone will be able to attend. In order to more easily handle requests for changes, we created a form to handle incoming ticket change requests.

We’ll continue to be in touch with updates about the conference and other ways to connect with all our lovely documentarians.

The Write the Docs Team

Last Updated: March 18, 2020

COVID-19 Update 02 - Postponing the Portland Conference

2020-03-10T00:00:00Z

The most recent COVID-19 update is:

Write the Docs 2020 conferences going virtual - Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Hey Folks,

Since our first announcement last week, we’ve been following the COVID-19 updates from the Oregon Health Authority and the CDC. We’ve also seen King County (Seattle) and Santa Clara County (SF Bay Area) explicitly request organizations cancel or postpone large gatherings. We have concluded that our event cannot go on as currently scheduled.

Our current plan of action is to postpone the conference, most likely to a date in August.

We’ll be talking to our venue, staff, speakers, and sponsors to find a date that works. We’d like to keep uncertainty to a minimum, so we hope to announce a final decision by March 20 at the latest.

If we do reschedule, we’ll transfer all existing tickets and sponsorships to the new conference date. We will refund tickets without charge for anyone who can’t make the new date.

If you have any questions, please reach out to portland@writethedocs.org.

In the meantime, we recommend keeping an eye on the official resources at:

The Write the Docs Team

Last Updated: March 10, 2020

COVID-19 Update 01

2020-03-03T00:00:00Z

The most recent COVID-19 update is:

Write the Docs 2020 conferences going virtual - Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Hey Folks,

As you’ve probably heard by now, the coronavirus (also known as COVID-19) is a new virus that causes respiratory illness in people and can easily spread from person-to-person. Since Write the Docs Portland 2020 is only 2 months away, we wanted to give you an update.

As of today, March 3, Write the Docs Portland 2020 is scheduled to go ahead.

We are watching the situation closely, and taking advice from the Oregon health authorities and the United States CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). We plan to reassess the situation regularly, you can find updates tagged with COVID-19.

If at the time of Write the Docs Portland 2020 you feel sick, or are worried that you might have been in contact with people who have been diagnosed with COVID-19, we encourage you to stay home. Your registration will be 100% refunded. If you have any questions about this, please reach out to portland@writethedocs.org.

We will continue to provide updates as the conference gets closer. In the meantime, we recommend keeping an eye on the official resources at:

The Write the Docs Team

Last Updated: March 3, 2020

Announcing sessions and opportunity grants

2020-02-12T00:00:00Z

We’re writing today with an update on the fast-approaching Portland conference!

First off, we’re delighted to announce that we’ve finalized our speakers for the event! Every year talk selection gets more and more difficult as we get a larger, stronger batch of submissions. Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to send us a pitch – we literally wouldn’t have an event without you!

Second, we’re super excited to announce our new opportunity grant program to support folks who would not otherwise be able to make it the conference.

There is also some info about ticket purchasing (now’s the time!), trip planning (Portland’s cool!), and our generous sponsors (want to join them?). Read on for more details!

Full speaker line-up

Every year, we look to bring a wide range of voices to the Write the Docs stage. Because the role of “documentarian” looks so different to each of us, we aim for a line-up that spans a good mix of practical, philosophical, and technical topics – with the odd whimsical one thrown in for good measure. We’re really excited about the presentations we’ve got this year – we hope you are too!

Paul Logan – The Search for Search

Kateryna Osadchenko – Collaborating with teams on content strategy planning: pitfalls and best practices

Alexandra White – Moving beyond empathy: a11y in documentation

Anni Bond – Writing Backwards: Documenting the End-of-Life of a Product

Jessica Garson – Creating Quality Sample Code

Matthew Baldwin – Read the Rules: What technical writers can learn from board game design

Luca Janssens – Finding the line: Balancing business continuity and documentation debt

Ryan Paul – Documentation as an application: enabling interactive content that is tailored to the user

Luc Perkins – Model-view-docs: taming large-scale documentation projects using structured data

Lucy Carey – Globalise the docs

Brooke Wayne – Don’t Fear Migration! How to Successfully Move Docs to a New Tool

Shavindri Dissanayake (Shavi) – Why SDK Docs Matter — And What I’m Doing About It!

Colin Dean – Building a content-focused, scientific document authoring workflow for Data Scientists and Engineers alike

Sally Stumbo – Walking Backwards: Tracing the New Customer Journey from Finish to Start to Help Shape Content

Dan Gunter – Where Documentation, Cloud-hosted Interactive Tutorials and Continuous Integration Testing Intersect

Avi Flax – Set your data free with model-based architecture diagramming

Head over to the Speakers page to see the full abstracts. We hope there’s something there for everyone to enjoy, and also something that will broaden your horizons a bit.

Opportunity grant program

The grant program for WTD Portland 2020 supports people who would otherwise not be able to attend the conference by covering attendance costs. Applications are open to anyone who wants to attend Write the Docs. Grant applications are open until March 1st, 2020, Midnight PST.

Head over to Opportunity grants and apply.

Tickets are going fast!

If you don’t have your ticket yet, now’s a great time to snap one up. Conference tickets have sold out for the last several years, and they go faster along with the speaker announcement, so if you’re planning to come, don’t leave it to the last minute.

Buy your tickets here!

Planning your trip

In the next few weeks, we’ll be announcing more details about the conference events, including the full schedule, annual hike on Saturday afternoon, writing day and reception on Sunday. But on top of that, there’s ALL SORTS of stuff to do in Portland.

We’ve got a couple of excellent volunteers – Christy and Mo – who are heading up our Explore Portland committee. They’re already hard at work updating the the Visit Portland. Pop into the #wtd-conferences channel on Slack if you have any question.

Thanks to our sponsors

We are so grateful to have our sponsors help in bringing these events to life every year. Thanks sincerely to the following companies for supporting the Write the Docs community:

Microsoft

Google

Redocly

Splunk

Slack

Cloud Native Computing Foundation

twilio

Mozilla

Salesforce

MongoDB

Head over to our sponsorship prospectus for details on how your company can get involved! We have several types of sponsorship available, including tables at the job fair that we’ll be hosting on Tuesday.

And that’s the latest on the Portland conference. We hope you’re all getting as excited as we are! Stay tuned for more details.

The Write the Docs Team