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Write the Docs Community Kickoff - January 2022¶

Hey folks, Eric Holscher here, one of the co-founders of Write the Docs. I’m here with the traditional January community update replacement to the newsletter. It’s a short one this year.

New hybrid conference format¶

Thanks to everyone who attended our virtual events in 2021. We had record attendance in Portland and Prague, and the Australian team took a well-deserved break. We continue to appreciate the warmth and spirit that you bring to our virtual events, and look forward to more of it in 2022.

Our goal this year is to tentatively, and safely, bring our conferences back to the in-person realm while keeping the improved accessibility provided by the virtual events. Managing hybrid in-person and virtual conferences is going to be a huge learning experience, but we think it will be worth it.

We hope that you’ll work with us to make all of our events special by submitting talks, and showing up with your usual enthusiasm and warmth. Hopefully your Pac-Man skills haven’t gotten too rusty :)

Overall community goals¶

We’ve been excited this year to see continued growth in our Slack network, now numbering over 15,000 people! A lot of work has been done to expand our ability to moderate the community, with WEP2 - Slack community moderation procedures being the cornerstone. Credit to Janine Chan who authored this WEP, and is the new lead of the Slack moderation team.

We’re also excited to kick off another round of our Salary Survey. This is the third year that we’ve been doing that, and we’ve gotten a lot of great feedback. Thanks to Kay Smoljak who continues to manage that for us.

I’d like to share a few pieces of anonymous feedback that show the value of this information to our community:

This survey really helped me feel confident in my ask last year when I was negotiating a raise.

I was promoted and given the biggest pay rise I’ve ever seen!

Even as a lone writer, I don’t feel alone. Kind of like I’m in a union!

We are still working to build more engagement with our Write the Docs Enhancement Proposal (WEP) process. Having our community governance more formalized (and documented) is one of our continuing goals, as is ensuring that people in the community have a voice in how the organization is run.

Other community updates¶

We have shared our high-level community stats for the past 5 years, and will continue to do it each year going forward. You can view our 2021 stats on our blog at Write the Docs 2021 Stats.

We’re are now accepting talk proposals for our Portland conference, May 22-24. All talks will be pre-recorded, so you can speak from anywhere again this year!

Submit your talk proposals by February 15th, If you need feedback or help with your talk proposal, we will be having a virtual talk prep meetup on February 3. The meetup will be announced soon, so follow that group or the #meetups channel in Slack.