Meet the Team¶
Our conference is run by a dedicated team consisting mostly of volunteers. This page outlines the folks who are helping get things done, and what their roles are.
Folks¶
Eric Holscher¶
Eric is one of the cofounders of Write the Docs, and also one of the cofounders of the Read the Docs documentation platform. He is the primary chair of the Portland conference, and loves to talk all things docs :)
Samuel Wright¶
Sam has been organizing Write the Docs conferences for even more than a few years now. He lives in Berlin unless he’s off to a conference or death metal festival somewhere. Sam works at EngFlow, and is into making computers do the boring bits of writing docs so he can work on the fun bits.
Mo Nishiyama¶
Mo Nishiyama is a Technical Writer at Oregon Health & Science University’s Information Technology Group. His professional passions include transforming dense engineer-speak into customer-friendly support articles, cultivating a community of tech writers in the workplace, promoting a human-centric work culture, and sharing career/life experiences through public speaking and essay writing. Mo is an Oxford comma advocate.
Alicia Duncan¶
Alicia loves to explain complex things in easy-to-understand ways and is passionate about harnessing the talent and collaborative spirit of others. She is currently Lead Technical Writer at Digi International, Inc., where she works closely (and remotely) with her internationally distributed development teams to document embedded Linux systems. She tends to be a human common denominator, bridging personalities and differences to bring people together.
Christy Lutz¶
Christy Lutz founded the Welcome Wagon program and adores making connections through it. She also crochets to relax, loves to dance, and is a Program Manager with a passion for docs at Dutchie.
Rose Williams¶
Rose co-leads the Meetup Coordination team and organizes the Florida and New England Write the Docs groups. She’s been on the conference team as the Lightning Talks coordinator for the past few years and occasionally moonlights as the Writing Day coordinator.
Jennifer Rondeau¶
Jennifer has been helping organize the Portland conference since 2015. She possesses an advanced degree she likes to call her license to speculate irresponsibly on the basis of insufficient data. She currently helps maintain the docs for Kubernetes, the open source container management and deployment system, part of her work as a technical writer working at a Kubernetes startup.
Sasha Romijn¶
Sasha is a Django and Python developer, and is our inclusivity, diversity, and well-being champion. Based in Amsterdam but traveling throughout Europe, Sasha has been sharing insight and helping communities and individuals become better versions of themselves, as well as co-authoring positive projects such as Happiness Packets and the “Less Obvious Conference Checklist”.
Mikey Ariel¶
Mikey is the documentation czar for Write the Docs in Europe. She is an avid dancer as well as singer, and has probably traveled across more of Europe than you have. Mikey is a senior technical writer at Red Hat living in Prague.
Hillary Fraley¶
Hillary contributes to the Write the Docs newsletter and helped organize the inaugural Write the Docs Cincinnati + Open Help in 2018. She’s a freelance technical writer and editor in Cincinnati.
Bio coming soon
Primary Roles¶
- Conference chair - Eric Holscher
- Conference co-chair - TBD
- Code of conduct response - See code of conduct page
- Speaker coordinator - Samuel Wright
- Unconference coordinator - Jennifer Rondeau & Hillary Frayley
- Lightning Talk coordinator - Rose Williams
- Hike coordinator - Eric Holscher
- Infrastructure coordinator - Sasha Romijn
- Swag coordinator - Mikey Ariel
- Communication coordinator - Mo Nishiyama
- Explore Portland coordinators - Alicia Duncan & Mo Nishiyama
- Job Fair coordinator - Jennifer Rondeau & Hillary Fraley
- Welcome Wagon coordinators - Christy Lutz & Alicia Duncan
- Sponsorship coordinator - Eric Holscher
- Writing Day coordinator - Rose Williams
- Volunteer coordinator - Alex Fornuto
- Emcee - Nik Blanchet
- Social media coordinator - TBD
You can read descriptions of all the roles in our Event Roles doc.