Announcing Presentations and Speakers¶
We’re excited to share with you the lineup for the 2017 Portland conference. This year we received over 100 proposals. Needless to say, the selection process was intense, as we had fewer than 20 slots for talks.
The topics this year cover a vast range of subjects, points of view, and real-world case studies. We hope that whatever your role may be, you can find something to relate to.
This year we are also trying a few new things!
First, we had a CFP for unconference sessions, so we could have a handful of committed “anchor sessions’ to help kick off the unconf. Of course you can still sign up to run an unconference session during the conference, but we hope that having a few scheduled sessions will help you with your personal schedule planning.
Second, we’re testing a new talk format this year: a 20-minute talk, followed by 10 minutes of small group discussion. The goal is to spark discussion among attendees and help break the ice a little. We’ll be running these talks during the morning of Day 1 of the conference, so that folks have the chance to get a taste for discussion, and hopefully join us in the unconference later in the day.
Third, this year’s pre-conference Writing Day is going to include a couple of paid workshops, in addition to the traditional freeform doc sprints. We’re starting out with two introductory workshops this year – one focused on writing fundamentals and one geared toward getting comfortable with Git. The cost of these workshops will be kept low ($100) to keep them accessible, and attendance will be limited to ensure we provide a good experience.
You’ll find more info and links to the full talk abstracts down below.
Presentations¶
- Amelia Abreu - Caring Systems: Documentation as care
- Ruthie BenDor - Even Naming This Talk Is Hard
- Matthew Buttler - Only Interesting Conversations: The symbiotic relationship between docs and support
- Lyzi Diamond - Testing: it’s not just for code anymore
- Sam Faktorovich - Interviewing and hiring technical writers: the Siberian way
- Sarah Hersh - Start with the tasks, not the endpoints
- Tom Johnson - Building navigation for your doc site: 5 best practices
- Andrea Longo - Do you know a runbook from a flip book? How sysadmins use documentation
- Christy Lutz - We may as well die here: Design critique guidelines make feedback easier
- Carl Parker - Intelligent Documents and the Verifiability Crisis in Science, Tech Writing, and Life
- Ryan Pitts & Lindsay Muscato - No Community Members Were Harmed in the Making of This Doc Sprint: How we ran a 48-hour event to collect community wisdom into a guidebook for newsroom developers
- Jodie Putrino - Treating documentation like code: a practical account
- Jesse Seldess - Bootstrapping Docs at a Startup
- Ingrid Towey - The Wisdom of Crowds: Crowdsourcing Minimalism in an Open Organization
- Kate Voss - Error Messages: Being Humble, Human, and Helpful will make users Happy
- Kenzie Woodbridge - Everyone’s a player (in a mid-90s MUD)
Unconference Sessions¶
- David Bastedo/Leona Campbell - Release Notes: What’s Working (and Not Working) for You? <
- Melissa Chavez - Worst-case Scenario Planning
- Jigyasa Grover - FOSS it up, with women!
- Mike Jang, Margaret Eker - Write the Docs Meetup Groups
- Ashleigh Rentz - QueerTea
Writing Day Workshops¶
- Matthew Desmond - Learn how to Git
- Heidi Waterhouse - Structuring and writing documentation
These workshops will be ticketed separately. You can buy them at our normal ticket site: https://ti.to/writethedocs/write-the-docs-na-2017
Ticket Reminder¶
If you haven’t purchased your ticket yet, time hasn’t quite run out. Check out the Tickets page for more details. More than half the tickets are already sold out, and we expect to sell out before the end of April, so don’t wait to get your tickets!
Prague Conference Update¶
In case your proposal wasn’t selected for our Portland conference, or if you (like some of our friends) were waiting for this announcement, we are happy to also launch our website and ticket sales for the conference that will be held on September 10-12 in Prague, Czech Republic.
The call for proposals for the Prague conference will open soon, so sign up for our mailing list and stay tuned!