Writing Day

Writing Day

What is Writing Day?

Writing Day is modeled after the concept of “sprints” or “hackathons”, which are common in open-source (OSS) conferences.

Held on Sunday, the first day of the conference, attendees are encouraged to bring a project or contribute to someone else’s project.

The main goal is to get interesting people in the same room, sharing their passion and goals and collaborating to find creative solutions to solve a problem or issue.

Attendees are invited to submit their project pre-conference! It’s a great way to get other attendees excited about contributing.

Note that a ticket for the conference is required to participate in Writing Day. This of course also grants entry to the other two conference days, with talks, unconference sessions and other activities.

There are two main types of Writing Day attendees:

  • Project leads: Attendees bringing ideas, content, or OSS projects to work on with contributors.

  • Contributors: Attendees looking to contribute to various content projects.

Here are examples of projects that you might see at the conference:

  • Open-source software documentation

  • General documentation writing

  • Best practices manual (for your company, or the world)

  • Resume, cover letter, and portfolio reviews

  • Blog posts

  • Tips and tricks

  • Great works of fiction

  • Love letters

  • The Documentarian Manifesto

If you find specific examples helpful, check out the Portland Writing Day 2023 project list.

Lead a Project

Leading a project at Writing Day is a wonderful opportunity to engage with documentarians from a variety of backgrounds, experience, and expertise. Their collective wealth of experience can help upgrade your documentation and create a more inclusive project. This empowers all of us to work together to create opportunities for each other and bigger, better communities.

Tips to create and lead a new project effectively:

  • Provide a project overview with a specific focus or goals: Your project overview is a 2-minute pitch (when read aloud) that describes your project and clearly defines a focus area or goal. Here’s a good example from Writing Day 2022: the Open Web Docs project.

  • Pre-label tasks and issues: Create a specific event label and label documentation tasks and issues. This empowers new contributors to find tasks that interest them.

  • Create a task filter: This helps contributors track and find issues more easily and see which issues have already been assigned.

  • Provide a clear onboarding process: Ensure your ReadMe, contribution guidelines, or onboarding instructions are accurate and up to date.

  • Add your project to the Writing Day project list: Adding your project to the list promotes your project to our attendees before the event. Many attendees have told us that their curiosity about certain projects incentivised their attendance.

  • Invite project experts to attend: We recommend having 1-2 project experts on your project. We love our developer advocates, community managers, and subject matter experts! You’re welcome to call for virtual reinforcements from your community as well.

  • Practice flexibility and understanding: Remember, some attendees may need additional info to successfully onboard to your project.

These are suggestions and not requirements. It is perfectly valid to show up to Writing Day, tell us about your project the day of, and ask for volunteers! It’s been done before and it will be done again.

Contribute to a Project

Writing Day is the perfect opportunity to learn about new projects and technologies. Some attendees stay at one table all day, others table-hop. Do what feels right to you.

Check out the project list! Keep in mind that some attendees choose to announce their projects during Writing Day, so their project information would not be available on the project list.

Tips to contribute to a project:

  • No matter your experience level, you are welcome! We are glad you’re here. Even if you feel you don’t have the right skills or experience or have never attended an event like Writing Day before, you’ll be surprised how much you can share.

  • Check out our guide to writing documentation. Our beginners guide will help you get started, and give you some ideas for how you can contribute to a project.

  • Ask people for help if you have a question. If at any time you get stuck with new concepts and tools, you are in a room full of friendly people from diverse backgrounds and experiences. If you are not sure who to ask, ask the Welcome Wagon or Registration staff or volunteers. We will help you find someone!

Logistics

Come prepared with the following tools:

  • Laptop, tablet, or other device

  • GitHub account (you may also want a GitLab account)

  • Text editor of your choice for coding or content creation

Call for Project Submissions

We strongly recommend that you submit your Writing Day project in advance! Projects submitted by *September 6, 2024* are promoted in our pre-conference Writing Day blog post and email.

As usual, virtual walk-on projects are always welcome. All attendees always have the option to bring a project, sign up onsite, and announce it during Writing Day.

If you need additional information to advocate for Writing Day in your community or organization, see the Convince Your Community resource.

Schedule

Writing Day is an all day event that is designed with flexibility in mind. Feel free to check out as many projects as make sense for you and your schedule!

  • Date & Time: Sunday, September 22, 10:30-17:00 UTC.

  • Location: Online conference platform.

Writing Day projects are welcome to join us for the entire event, the first session, or the second session. The first and second session time blocks are separated by a 30-minute snack break.

We will do a shared intro session at 10:30 UTC and 14:30 UTC. Project leaders, please join the platform early to acclimate to the space and test your audio/video.

Project setup:

  • 10:00 UTC to 10:30 UTC

  • 12:00 CEST to 12:30 CEST

  • 06:00 EDT to 06:30 EDT

First session and introductions:

  • 10:30 UTC to 14:00 UTC

  • 12:30 CEST to 16:00 CEST

  • 06:30 EDT to 10:00 EDT

Snack break: 14:00 - 14:30 UTC

Second session and announcements:

  • 14:30 UTC to 17:00 UTC

  • 16:30 CEST to 19:00 CEST

  • 10:30 EDT to 13:00 EDT

Project list

Submit your project using our Writing Day project form or send us a PR with your project info!

Mutual Aid for Tech Writer/Documentarian Job Hunters (second session)

Join project organizer, Kenzie Woodbridge (they/them), during the second Writing Day session.

Let’s help each other get ready for our job searches! Are you thinking of applying for new or different tech writer/documentarian jobs and would appreciate feedback on your resume? Or, are you responsible for hiring and know what you’re looking for in a resume and application?

Let’s get together and offer each other some feedback on the important documentation we’re using to move our careers forward.

WTD Meetup resources for organizers (second session)

Join project organizer, Rose Williams, for the second Writing Day session.

Our goal is to update the content infrastructure, consolidate resources, and add templates to better support Write the Docs Meetup organizers.

Agenda:

I recommend contributing to this project using the built in GitHub web-based editor. Mostly because I am not a Git or GitHub expert.

Audinux - Plan and Publish a User Guide (All day)

Join project organizer, Hank Lee, during Writing Day.

Plan and Publish User Guide for Audinux, a repository for FOSS music applications and plugins

Audinux is a repository for FOSS music applications and plugins. We want to empower creative people and help them use Audinux to its full potential! To do that, we need documentarians to help us create a user guide.

Our Writing Day goal is to work together and create a user guide for Audinux. Creating a user guide will positively impact our users and encourage new users.

Our plan is to create new documentation pages within the ‘User Guide’ templates, check out our project repository. This means you can contribute using the GitHub web editor or using whatever Git-workflow from your favorite local writing setup and text editor.

Check out the Audinux issue tracker. During Writing Day you are encouraged to select a ticket to work on, that is the best place to track the work you’ve done and ask any specific questions.

Session 1:

  • Introduction to Audinux

  • Intended audience

  • Content type

  • Tools for publication

  • End to end processes

  • Template: Initial configuration for music creation (Instrument: Electric guitar)

  • Audio tools

Session 2:

  • How to find right Audio/Music packages for your creative work

  • Audio Plug-ins

Topics to choose from:

  • How to find subpackages that complement plugins and install subpackages

  • How to load plugins to DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and OBS Studio

  • Rack and patchbay

  • Use cases: Home recording

We are looking for anyone interested in this effort to join us.

Improve Open Source Docs with EkLine

EkLine is at Writing Day to offer their open-core license for OSS projects.

During Writing Day, OSS projects (or their regular contributors), can receive a free EkLine license to apply to their project.

Folks from EkLine will be available during Writing Day to help you and your project:

  • Onboard to EkLine

  • Run a scan (or whatever it is)

  • Submit project fixes based on what EkLine discovers

Ekline’s project is appropriate for open source project maintainers and regular contributors. It is not necessarily appropriate for those who do not have a relationship with an OSS project to use randomly.

Join us to make impactful contributions to open-source documentation while learning a valuable tool.

The Good Docs Project - Template adoption workshop (second session)

The Good Docs Project is an open source community of 75+ technical writers, doc tools experts, UX designers, and software engineers who are committed to improving the quality of documentation in open source. We aim to educate and empower people to create high-quality documentation by providing them with templates, resources, best practices, and tools to enhance their documentation in open source and beyond.

For Writing Day, we’ll give a brief introduction to our project, followed by a workshop that will give you a chance to provide feedback on how we can help more people use templates in their daily documentation workflows.

Get an early preview of The Good Docs Project writing day agenda.

Code with the Carolinas

Join Code with the Carolinas to update and enhance our Codeberg Repository Documentation. Codeberg is a free, open-source (FOSS) alternative to GitHub. Our goal is to develop inclusive documentation that is easier to understand and navigate.

Code with the Carolinas is a small, all-volunteer civic tech organization focused on using technology to benefit the community. We use Codeberg, an open source collaborative coding platform. The ‘pages’ repository maintained on Codeberg hosts the code for the website and a wiki with documentation. Our documentation and website have improved considerably since we brought this project to Writing Day for the first time in 2023.

Our goal for this year’s Writing Day is to update the wiki and create more inclusive documentation for current and future contributors in the organization. We want clearer guidance for our contributors, regardless of their experience level.

To help align our project for Writing Day we have the following personas:

  • Advanced contributors - regular contributors who use VSCode or similar text editors

  • Beginner contributors - new or occasional contributeors who make small changes inline

  • Core team contributors - core team members, founding team members, and Codeberg administrators

With your help, here’s what we want to accomplish during Writing Day:

  • Clearer onboarding documentation aimed at the new contributor persona

  • Navigation improvements for the documentation wiki

  • Create best practices for keeping documentation up to date

  • Implement test cases for pull requests for content verification and compliance

  • Review existing documentation to confirm it meets the needs of our user personas

  • Create technical guides for merging code collaboratively authored in Codeberg

  • Fixing content in our documentation using issues from the repository

We believe Writing Day will help us explore opportunities to attract contributors and encourage them to continue to collaborate with us. Thank you for your assistance and happy coding!