Write the Docs Community Update - January 2024

Hey folks, Eric Holscher here, one of the co-founders of Write the Docs. I’m here with our traditional January community update while the newsletter team takes the month off.

2024 is looking to be a refinement of our approach to 2023, with a few experiments thrown in.

Our 2024 conferences

It was lovely to see everyone again in Portland & Australia conferences this year, and to connect with folks online at our Atlantic conference. It was a lot of work to move to a new venue in Portland, but we think it’s a great space to build our community in the future. Planning for 2024 has felt a lot less stressful, with some small tweaks like adding additional space for the unconference and moving catering into a dedicated space.

We’re planning similar events for 2024:

  • Portland will be in-person on April 14-16.
  • Atlantic will be a virtual event, spanning the East Coast and European timezones, on September 22-24.
  • Australia will likely be in-person again in December, but we’re still working on the details.

We are currently accepting talk proposals and selling tickets for our Portland conference. Submit your talk proposals by January 15th. Ticket sales will remain open until the week before the conference.

We hope that you’ll work with us to make all of our events unique again this year by submitting talks and showing up in-person or virtually.

Community board, one year in

We’ve had our Community Board in place for a year now, and we’ve been posting quarterly updates for everyone to read. We continue to refine our processes and approach, and would love any feedback that folks have.

Overall, we’re pretty happy with the structure that we have in place, and are looking forward to continuing to refine it in 2024. We’d like to thank all the community board members, who also serve as team leads for the community, for their dedication and enthusiasm in supporting our events and online spaces.

If you’re interested in joining one of the community teams, check out all the team descriptions and contacts on the Team page.

Salary Survey

We just closed the 2023 Salary Survey, and we’re excited to announce that we received over 1,000 responses. There were enough contractors this year for us to break out some high-level data, along with our normal breakdown of full-time employees.

We plan to release the results in Q2, in time for the Portland conference, and will be sure to share them in the newsletter and on social media. There was a conversation in slack about doing a tooling survey this year, which we are considering as an additional service to the community. We aren’t 100% sure what that will look like yet, so if you have any good examples or ideas, please let us know!

Other community updates

We have shared our high-level community stats for past 6 years, and this year is no different! You can view our 2023 stats at Write the Docs 2023 Stats.

From our sponsor

This month’s newsletter is sponsored by Knowledge Owl:


KnowledgeOwl Joins the B Corp Movement! 🎉 As of December 6, 2023, KnowledgeOwl is owlficially B Corporation Certified! We are now part of a global movement of companies that are committed to using business as a force for good.

B Corps have committed to high standards of social and environmental responsibility. Going through the rigorous B Corp assessment process was a way for us to demonstrate our commitment to being a force for good for both people and the planet.

If your team is looking for owlsome knowledge base software made by a small team with a big heart, you can try KnowledgeOwl for free here!🦉

Knowledge Owl

Interested in sponsoring the newsletter? Take a look at our sponsorship prospectus.

Have a great year

Thanks again for being part of our journey.

The Write the Docs team