Introduction to the Write the Docs community

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

Write the Docs operates on an open source model, which means that anyone can join and contribute to Write the Docs.

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

Zooming out for a moment, a community is a group of people with shared interests, goals, or values who have relationships with each other. Communities are also social groups that gather in certain places, and we choose our communities.

The Write the Docs community has two main facets: (1) the online communities and (2) the in-person meetups, events, and conferences that take place around the world.

The primary goals of Write the Docs is to promote the importance of good documentation and bring the community together. It’s a wonderful community to be part of!

Why be a part of Write the Docs

Write the Docs is an inclusive community. This means that the community takes active, sustained, and sincere steps to welcome all kinds of individuals.

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

All types of people can care about documentation, and you don’t have to prove your worth to participate in the Write the Docs community. All you have to do is follow the Code of Conduct and be a decent human.

Swapnil Ogale, a Technical Communicator and organizer of the Write the Docs Australia meetup, said:

“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.”

Margaret Eker, a Senior Technical Writer, said:

"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."

History of Write the Docs

Troy Howard, Eric Redmond, and Eric Holscher founded Write the Docs after they realized there was no community for documentation writers.

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 said:

“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 conference sign ups from Portland locals.

Instead, hundreds of people from all over the place expressed their interest, so 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 if you’re willing to travel. There are also numerous platforms online where documentarians congregate and discuss all things documentation.

Below we'll share 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 the conference and try virtually connecting with a few folks you might like to connect with at the conference.

If you want Write the Docs to consider hosting a future conference near you, let them know, and you never know what might happen!

Meetups

Write the Docs has regular meetups around the world.

These meetups are 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!

Slack

One of the fastest and easiest ways 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 you can get the most out of the experience.

Another good way to get involved in 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 live in the same area. This tactic can be less overwhelming than diving straight the group channels.

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 and also communicates important updates.

Bluesky

Write the Docs is active on Bluesky! The best ways to get involved on Bluesky is to interact with posts by Write the Docs and other documentarians, follow other documentarians, and share your own insights or ask questions.

Resources

Conference videos

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

Software documentation guide

Check out the Software 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, and more.

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 how valuable Write the Docs conferences are!

Making the most of conferences

If you’re nervous about attending a conference for the first time or have had bad experiences at other conferences, Write the Docs thoroughly addresses these concerns.

Write the Docs conference have some amazing rules that 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.

Here's how to follow the Pac-Man Rule:

“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 encourages the mindset that we should be consciously welcoming to new people. This atmosphere makes it really easy to make new friends!

The Snowball Rule

This is a more proactive rule that helps established folks stay motivated to meet new people.

The Snowball Rule 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 was founded in the style of other open source communities.

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 Writing Day during one of the conferences where you'll have the chance to contribute with group support.

Final remarks

Joining a community gives you opportunities for professional development, social connection, learning, and a chance to have lots of fun.

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

For even more on Write the Docs, check out this spotlight article.

🎧 Bonus resource: The Not-Boring Tech Writer is a podcast hosted by Kate Mueller for anyone who writes technical documentation of any kind, including those who may not feel comfortable calling themselves tech writers.

The Not-Boring Tech Writer is generously sponsored by KnowledgeOwl, knowledge base software built for people who care, by people who care. 🦉