Write the Docs Community Board Quarterly Update Q1-2023

Greetings, documentarians! Mikey Ariel here, chairperson of the newly formed community board and former head organizer of the Prague conference.

As you might have heard, at the end of 2022 I stepped down from my role as conference chair and transitioned to the new role of community board chair. The board meets quarterly during the first month of the quarter, and is comprised of each team lead in the WTD organization.

Our main goal with this group is to discuss and drive more long-term strategic initiatives and collaboration for the community.

Quarterly meeting update - Q1

As a part of my duties, I am tasked with communicating a summary of each quarterly meeting. This will be the place where we share some of the highlights of what we’re working on, and any topics of interest or ideas for the community that were discussed during the meeting.

This first blog post is more oriented towards introducing the board, since we spent most of our first meeting aligning expectations, deciding on our meeting format and other communication channels, and other meta-topics for the group itself.

In the meantime, I can share with you that we have some great ideas from the Meetups team on how to improve our social media strategy, and we’d love to get some more from the community. Stay tuned for more details in one of the upcoming newsletters.

We will also start reviewing the global community initiative backlog and triage as many of the requests that have been accumulating as we can. I am excited to be able to curate all the lovely ideas and suggestions that we’ve received from our teams and from community members, so that we can focus our efforts on what matters most to the community (that’s all of you!).

What is the community board

In case you want a refresher on how the board was formed and who is a member, here is the TL;DR:

The Community Board exists to curate the overall strategic direction of the community.

The members are the team leads of each of the Write the Docs team, as well as the conference chairs of our various conferences:

  • Mikey Ariel (CoreOps, Brand and design, board chair)
  • Eric Holscher (CoreOps, Portland chair)
  • Samuel Wright (CoreOps, Infrastructure)
  • Sasha Romijn (CoreOps, Support, Atlantic Chair)
  • Rose Williams (Meetups)
  • Janine Chan (Slack moderation)
  • Aaron Collier (Newsletter)
  • Swapnil Ogale (Australia chair)

The board will meet quarterly in real-time, and provide status updates asynchronously monthly. Board members can share the status of what they’re working on and request any help to keep the various teams functioning effectively.

This board was established as a part of a full team restructuring effort. You can see the full set of changes in WEP 4.

Thank you

Thanks again to the team leads for joining our community board, and to all the team members (mostly volunteers!) who work diligently to support the community and each other.

See you in the next quarterly update!

Mikey and the community board