Blog - Posts tagged sponsors

Announcing speakers

2021-07-30T00:00:00Z

Hello, documentarians! Today we’re happy to announce the full list of talks and speakers for the 2021 Prague virtual conference.

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!

Full speaker line-up

Every year, we look to bring a wide range of voices to the Write the Docs stage. Because being a documentarian can mean different things to different people, 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!

Lana Brindley (she/her) – More than words: Reviewing and updating your information architecture

Karen Sawrey – Hustling for Fun and Profit as a Technical Writer: A Freelancing Starter Kit

Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti – When documenting is designing: How to assist API design as a technical writer

Jenn Leaver – Docs leadership: How to become a stronger leader for your team

Anita Diamond – Cognitive Ergonomics in Technical Writing - Lessons from the Field

Lukas Reußner – Hitchhiker’s Guide to Documentation Tools and Processes

Felicity Brand – How to write a book for (and with) an open source community

Anna Korinna Németh-Szabó – Alchemy in Adversity (How to become better and more resilient tech writers in a turbulent work environment)

Victor Sluiter – Adventures in setting up a knowledge system for a research group

Kate Santo – From travel content to technical content: my journey

Kevin Hwang – Customer Feedback is the Fuel in our Engine

Ryan Macklin (he/they) – So you need to give bad news to users…

Kat Stoica Ostenfeld – How I use applied linguistics to be a better technical writer

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

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 attend, don’t leave it to the last minute.

Buy your tickets here!

Our Opportunity Grant program is still open until August 15th. If buying a ticket is difficult for you, please don’t hesitate to apply to the grant program.

Meetup organizer discount: As a thanks to our meetup organizers, we’re happy to offer you a 50% discount on your tickets. Please email us at prague@writethedocs.org, tell us which meetup you organize, and we will send you registration instructions.

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:

Red Hat

people text

KnowledgeOwl

JetBrains

Open Web Docs

Aiven

MDN Web Docs

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 Prague conference. We hope you’re all getting as excited as we are! Stay tuned for more details.

The Write the Docs Team

Shirts are on sale, Call for Proposals is closing soon

2021-06-21T00:00:00Z

Greetings, documentarians in Europe and beyond! We hope you’re doing alright and staying safe wherever you are.

Today we’re happy to announce that we launched our T-Shirt Pop-Up Shop (for a limited time only!) and to remind you that the Call for Proposals is closing at the end of this month, so if you haven’t submitted your proposal, now is the time.

Shirts on sale

The Write the Docs Prague 2021 Pop-Up Shop is open, and starting this year we updated the logo to include the year of the conference. You can order 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 November 1st. Shipping is available from the USA or Europe. However, due to the global shipping situation, we recommend you order your shirt at least 2-3 weeks in advance if you want to sport your new threads during the conference.

Submit your talk by June 30th

There are still a few days left to submit your proposal! Check out the Call for Proposals page for more details about what we are looking for.

And if you already have an idea but you’d like to brainstorm it with someone from the community, you can always ask for feedback on the Write the Docs Slack. The community is there to help!

We’ll then be reviewing all the talk proposals, and will be contacting everyone who submitted a proposal by July 16, 2021.

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 published our virtual sponsorship prospectus for the conference, and are open for new sponsorship inquiries.

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.

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

Red Hat

people text

KnowledgeOwl

JetBrains

Open Web Docs

Aiven

MDN Web Docs

Looking forward to seeing you all in our virtual space!

Announcing speakers and sessions

2021-02-17T00:00:00Z

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

We’re delighted to announce that we’ve finalized our speakers for the event, and have updated t-shirts on sale. Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to send us a pitch – we literally wouldn’t have an event without you!

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!

Abigail McCarthy – A guide to getting started in open source

Jessica Garson – Writing a perfect technical tutorial

Deanna Thompson – Building a style guide from the ground up: lessons learned from a lone writer

Katherine Karaus – Invisible influence — the documentation behind UX copy

Rachael Stavchansky – Shuffle ball change: Sashay your way to clearer API documentation

Falon Darville – Almost None to Some: Driving DISQO’s Doc Culture as a Solo Documentarian

Daniele Procida – Always complete, never finished

Rin Oliver – Writing Documentation with Neurodivergent Open Source Contributors In Mind

Swapnil Ogale – Putting the “tech” in technical writer

Sarah R. Rodlund – Beyond metrics: Using maturity models to develop a docs strategy

Paris Buttfield-Addison – The Secret History of Libraries

Nicola Yap – Level Up - Onboarding that enables writers to thrive

Ines Stefanovic – Is Tech Writer a Tester, and Vice Versa, Is Tester a Tech Writer?

Laura Novich – Documentation Communities: Sound Strategy or Documentarian’s Gambit?

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.

Shirts on sale

The Write the Docs Portland 2021 Pop-Up Shop is open, and starting this year we updated the logo to include the year of the conference! You can order 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 May 31st. Shipping is available from the USA or Europe. However, due to the global shipping situation, we recommend you order your shirt at least 2-3 weeks in advance if you want to sport your new threads during the conference.

Tickets are going fast!

Buy your tickets here!

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:

Google

Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Slack

Twilio

KnowledgeOwl

MongoDB

Juniper

Netlify

Starburst

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

Announcing speakers

2020-09-30T00:00:00Z

Hello! We are here with an update on the online Australia and India conference!

To start off, we’re delighted to announce that we’ve finalised our speakers for the event! Every year, talk selection gets more and more difficult as we get a larger, stronger batch of submissions. A big thank you to everyone who took the time to send us a proposal – we literally wouldn’t have an event without you!

Full speaker line-up

Kenzie Woodbridge – Everyone’s a player (in a mid-90s MUD)

Sayraphim Lothian – How (and why) to make awesome video tutorials

Ankita Tripathi – Overcoming the Plight of Lone Writers

Marcelina Haftka – Legacy content from various perspectives

Andrea Szöllössi – 5 things I learned from my first open source contribution

Marika Vertzonis – A treasure map for the doc – Exploring the discoverability of documentation

Lana Brindley – When Agile Fails: Working on Large Documentation Projects

Michael Belton – Onboard yourself: How to get set-up for success in a new role

Chris Ward – An introduction to developer experience, and the role of a documentarian

Sam Irons – Content strategy in practice: a case study

Scott DeLoach – Microcontent: Designing & Developing Reusable Content

Yael Ben-David – Little words, big ideas: How to write microcopy that works

Akshay Iyer – Storytelling for Technical Products - What We Can Learn from Lego and Pixar

Vikram Mulay – Influence your customer outreach with best practices for internationalization

Matt Reiner – The Pains of Composition: How to write your best documentation in a collaborative world

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.

Tickets are going fast!

Buy your tickets here!

Our Opportunity Grant program is still open until November 1, 2020. If buying a ticket is difficult for you, please don’t hesitate to apply to the grant program.

Meetup organiser discount: As a thanks to our meetup organisers, we’re happy to offer you a 50% discount on your tickets. Please email us at australia@writethedocs.org, tell us which meetup you organise, and we will send you receive registration instructions.

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:

Redocly

Google

Red Hat

KnowledgeOwl

Head over to our sponsorship prospectus for details on how your company can get involved! We have several types of sponsorship available.

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

The Write the Docs Team

Announcing speakers

2020-08-18T00:00:00Z

We’re writing today with an update on the first online Prague 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!

Full speaker line-up

Karissa Van Baulen – The Importance of Using Analytics and Feedback for your Documentation

Kruno Golubić – From Graffiti Writer to Technical Writer

Karen Sawrey – Remote Job On-boarding: Top 10 Things We Can Do (Better)

Diana Lakatos – Helping Your Community Contribute to Developer Documentation

Matt Reiner – Bake a Little Documentation Love into Your Product

Abigail Sutherland – Organizing a Confluence hoard, or, does this page spark joy?

Natali Vlatko – Documenting the (Ancient) History of Your Project

Myriam Jessier – Making documentation discoverable in search engines

Andrew Haynes – A Journey to Pattern Languages

Jen Weaver – Future-Proofing Your Support Visuals

Paul Brown – The Baseline – Or Technical Writing for Non-Technical Readers

Chris Noonan – The Rocky Road to DocOps

Jessica Valasek Estenssoro, Arthur D’Herbemont – How to be an Avante-Garde Guinea Pig: Building Better Content through Experimentation, Community-building, and Loud Squeaks

Joe Malin – Need Examples? Write Your Own!

Tanks Transfeld – Emulating the Teacher’s Approving Nod in Teaching Material

Ingrid K Towey – When Wishing Still Helped … What Folklore Can Teach Us about Technical Writing

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.

Tickets are going fast!

Buy your tickets here!

Our Opportunity Grant program is still open until September 1st. If buying a ticket is difficult for you, please don’t hesitate to apply to the grant program.

Meetup organizer discount: As a thanks to our meetup organizers, we’re happy to offer you a 50% discount on your tickets. Please email us at prague@writethedocs.org, tell us which meetup you organise, and we will send you receive registration instructions.

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:

Google

Red Hat

Elasticsearch

KnowledgeOwl

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

The Write the Docs Team

Announcing virtual conference dates

2020-07-10T00:00:00Z

Write the Docs Australia 2020 will be a virtual conference. For the first time we are partnering with Write the Docs India for 2 days of Asia Pacific documentation goodness!

We’re holding the conference in December, to allow for enough time after the new Prague conference dates in October. The main conference days will be on Thursday, December 3, 11:00-21:00 AEDT, and the Friday, December 4, 11:00-21:00 AEDT. Essentially, these times will cover timezones to cater for our community from either coast of Australia to the Indian subcontinent later in the day.

We would love to see documentarians from other parts of the Asia Pacific region join us in this APAC timezone friendly conference.

Ticket sales will open end of July. Check out the tickets page for prices. Your virtual ticket includes:

Live streaming of all talks
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

Support our community by sponsoring

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

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

The Write the Docs Australia and India Team

Announcing virtual conference dates

2020-06-12T00:00:00Z

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

We decided to move the conference to October, to allow for enough time after the new Portland conference dates in August. The writing day will be on Sunday, October 18, 10:00-17:00 CEST, and the main conference days will be on Monday/Tuesday, October 19-20, 10:00-18:00 CEST.

Ticket sales will re-open in the summer. Check out the tickets page for prices. Your virtual ticket includes:

Live streaming of all talks
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 Portland 2020 ticket to a virtual pass, you will receive further details by e-mail when we open ticket sales.

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 sponsorship prospectus for the conference, and are open for new sponsorship inquiries.

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.

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

Announcing sessions and opportunity grants

2020-02-12T00:00:00Z

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

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

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!

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

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

Announcing speakers and talks

2019-09-11T00:00:00Z

G’dday fellow documentarians in Australia and beyond!

We’re happy to write to you with the latest news about our upcoming Australian conference, there’s lots to share and with the conference just over two months away, we hope you’re all getting excited!

Firstly, we’ve finalised 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 proposal – we literally wouldn’t have an event without you!

We also have some info about ticket purchasing (now’s the time!), call for volunteers, and sponsor updates.

Full speaker line-up

Paris Buttfield-Addison – Making interactive narrative storytelling accessible to everyone

Payal Dhiman – Being a user’s documentarian: Studying user’s behavior and then defining a strategy for documentation.

Rachel Robins – Supercharge your writing process with a designer’s toolkit

Alexander Koren – Rethinking Release Notes

Nithya Krishnan – Minimal Viable Product - What does this mean for user documentation

Riona MacNamara – Knowledge Is Power: Documentation as a tool for equity and inclusion

Fraser Mitchell – Through the looking glass - how user testing can give technical writers better perspective

Akhil Behl – Your First Book - Doesn’t have to be rocket science!

Leticia Mooney – The amazing, fantastic human bias that makes you bang your head on your desk

Alec Clews – Creating API documentation for international communities

Elle Geraghty – Information architecture for documentation

Cameron Shorter – TheGoodDocsProject - Doc Fixit

Sarah Maddox – Kubeflow open source docs need your help!

Becky Todd – Git the Docs - A fun, hands-on introduction to version control

Sarah Maddox – Tech Writing 101 Workshop

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

Call for volunteers

There is plenty to do during the conference and volunteers are essential to the success of all our events! We are looking for folks who are willing to help out during the conference. If you volunteer for two or more shifts (at an average of three hours each), you will receive a free ticket for the conference.

We are looking for folks to help out in these roles:

Venue set up - Prepping the main conference hall on Thursday (early morning), including preparing the registration desk, laying out swag, arranging writing day boards, and other light physical labour
Workshops/Doc Fixits - Assisting the Workshops and Doc Fixits speakers, including general information inquiries, directing attendees to specific tables, helping writing day project leads with logistical questions, and other duties as assigned
Registration desk/Info - Registering people in the main conference hall and answering any questions
Speakers - Finding speakers and making sure that they’re where they need to be when it comes time to speak
Talk Timing - Keeping track of the length of the talks and warning speakers when they’re running out of time
Unconference - Camping out in the unconference area downstairs, keeping the place in order, updating unconference room schedule, and so on
Venue take down - What’s more fun than setting things up? Taking them down! Helping with taking down the conference set up and leaving the conference hall better than we found it
Sydney expert - If you are a Sydney local and would like to share your tips and recommendations or answer questions about places to eat, sightseeing, services, accommodation, or other events that are happening around the conference, we’d love to have you on board!
Floaters - Other duties as assigned ;) Assisting with odds and ends, requests from other volunteers and organizers, as well as answering questions; overall, being generally helpful

If you’re not sure how to do any of these tasks, don’t worry, the organisers will be available for questions and any problems you may encounter. We also have a dedicated volunteer coordinator and some volunteers from previous years will join us again, so you will have support.

To register as a volunteer for the conference, please read and fill out the Call for Volunteers form. You will receive additional information by mid-October regarding shifts, detailed duties, and other updates to the volunteer duties and schedules.

Please email our volunteer coordinator Alexandra Perkins at australia@writethedocs.org if you have any questions about volunteering for the conference.

Tickets are going fast!

If you don’t have your ticket yet, now’s a great time to snap one up. Last year we reached capacity a week before the conference, and this year we expect to reach it even sooner (we have already sold out 25% of the tickets), so if you’re planning to come, don’t leave it to the last minute.

Buy your tickets here!

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:

Want to lend a hand? Head over to our sponsorship prospectus for details on how your company can get involved! We have several types of sponsorship available, and is a great way to support and tap into the growing Australian community.

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

The Write the Docs Australia Team