Write the Docs PDX 2021: Main Stage, Day 2 Recap
I offer applause for, bows to and tips-of-the-hat toward the splendiferous WTD organizers.
It was a resounding success across both main stage days. My first all-digital conference went very well. And despite the obvious drawbacks being remote, it still felt like WTD.
Day 2 recap
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Reward your contributors, then reward them again. While I’m not working in open-source software (OSS), Laura Novich offered this sage advice. Rewards should be meaningful, personal, consistent, global (i.e., applicable to every geography as well as gender neutral), and tiered. Whether that’s a t-shirt or a forum badge, give your rewards a lot of thought!
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Style guides: build with what you already have. Absolutely loved this hard lesson learned from Deanna Thompson. My team put a lot of work into our own guide last year. We burned a lot of cycles debating the output. In the end, we kept the content inside Confluence, our tool du jour.
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Guild run: doc style. Falon Darville made similar points about imperfection and incompleteness that Daniele Procida made on day one. These two talks together got my mind racing. Documentation is organic, Falon argued, and the act of description rather than limitation. We can impede doc growth by over-prescribing a plan or structure. Also embedded were strategies to grow more friends of the docs in your organization. I liked Falon’s Tech Doc Guild Falon idea made up of key collaborators. Docs should have room to breathe among those who actually give a shit about content.
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Write instructions that sell products. Ryan Macklin’s lightning talk stuck with me long past his five-minute limit. A former board game designer turned tech writer, Ryan brought a unique perspective. While I often try and maintain the firewall between tech docs and product docs (there is a difference!), he’s not wrong. So what if your doc toolchain is the coolest, most-cutting-edge? If it doesn’t match the needs of the user then you’re not helping reduce client churn. As he noted, board game rulesets are often make-or-break for buyers. If the instructions are obtuse, it’s likely they won’t play your current or future titles.
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Tech writers need onboarding too. That’s an obvious statement, right? But as Nicola Yap detailed, even massive companies like Google can sweep technical writing under the rug. Nicola spearheaded a successful expansion and of proper onboarding to new Google documentarians. There’s too much good stuff to summarize here, so I recommend checking out the full recording when it goes live next week on the WTD YouTube channel. In the meantime, Nicola graciously shared the open source onboarding toolkit over at GitHub.
That’s all for this year’s Portland conference. Looking forward to 2021. If we all continue to do our part during the pandemic, maybe the 2022 event can be in person again.
Quick plug: Raw notes from both days of stage presentations are available at my GitHub page.
Cheers!
