Write the Docs Community Board Quarterly Update Q3-2024

Greetings, documentarians! Mikey Ariel here, chairperson of the WTD community board. I’m happy to share the third quarterly update for 2024 with you.

To catch up on previous quarterly updates, check out the community board blog posts archive.

Q3 quarterly meeting highlights

Our Q3 meeting covered several initiatives that the team leads have been working on, as well as some conference-related topics:

  • Team resources: Following the Trello pricing change, to ensure that specialized teams have a stable platform to manage their tasks, we decided to create Trello workspaces for each conference as well as the meetup team. Each conference chair can now manage a standalone workspace with multiple boards, which also gives them more flexibility to add and remove team members for each year. The GitHub projects pilot was cancelled, and the meetups team will move back to Trello under their own dedicated workspace.
  • Atlantic infrastructure: Hopin usage is officially deprecated, and the Atlantic 2024 virtual conference will be held on Venueless. Venueless is connected to the Pretalx platform where we already manage our calls for proposals, and their support team has been responsive and helpful during the pilot stage. Ticketholders for the Atlantic 2024 conference will receive instructions on how to log into the conference using their Ti.to ticket contact information.
  • Meetups: The meetups team has been pursuing an audit of the active meetup.com accounts that WTD has been supporting. This is a part of the ongoing effort to ensure that active meetups get the support they need while ensuring that the WTD organization is not paying for meetup groups that have been inactive for an extended period of time. Rose Williams has been compiling an updated set of guidelines for WTD sponsorship of meetup.com accounts, and will update the team guidance when it is finalized.
  • Newsletter: The Newsletter team happily added a new author to its roster, and Aaron Collier is working with Eric Holscher to investigate additional sponsorship options due to high demand from organizations. They are also in contact with some of our community members who offered to help with refactoring some of the topic indexing of the WTD website and documentation guides.
  • Salary survey: The 2023 salary survey results have been published on our website, and the responses have been more robust than ever. Mikey has been reducing her involvement in non-board projects, so the primary board contact for the survey will be Sam Wright. Stay tuned for the 2024 survey, which will be launched in early September and will remain open until the end of the year.
  • Slack moderation: The WTD Slack is continuing to enjoy a stable and relatively low volume of spammer blog posts, and the moderators have not had to handle as many reports as this time last year. Janine Chan will continue to coordinate with her team on any new issues that might come up.
  • Portland: The Portland conference team has already started working on Write the Docs Portland 2025, and dates have been published on our website.
  • Australia: The Australia conference team is celebrating its 8th birthday! The Call for Proposals is closing this week, but tickets are available and all the information is available on the Write the Docs Australia 2024 website.

As always, the board continues to review the community backlog to determine what are the most valuable efforts for the community in the short and long term.

What is the community board

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

The board members are team leads for each WTD 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 community board meets quarterly in real-time, and provides monthly asynchronous status updates. Board members can share the status of what they’re working on and request any help to keep the various teams functioning effectively.

Thank you

Thanks again to the team leads that participate in the community board, and to all the team members (mostly volunteers!) who work diligently to support the community and each other. If you want to join any of the WTD community teams, check out the Team page for team descriptions and contacts.

See you in the next update, and wishing everyone a joyous and productive 2024!

Mikey and the community board