Announcing sessions and opportunity grants¶
We’re writing today with an update on the fast-approaching Portland conference!
First off, we’re delighted to announce that we’ve finalized our speakers for the event! Every year talk selection gets more and more difficult as we get a larger, stronger batch of submissions. Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to send us a pitch – we literally wouldn’t have an event without you!
Second, we’re super excited to announce our new opportunity grant program to support folks who would not otherwise be able to make it the conference.
There is also some info about ticket purchasing (now’s the time!), trip planning (Portland’s cool!), and our generous sponsors (want to join them?). Read on for more details!
Full speaker line-up¶
Every year, we look to bring a wide range of voices to the Write the Docs stage. Because the role of “documentarian” looks so different to each of us, we aim for a line-up that spans a good mix of practical, philosophical, and technical topics – with the odd whimsical one thrown in for good measure. We’re really excited about the presentations we’ve got this year – we hope you are too!
- Paul Logan – The Search for Search
- Kateryna Osadchenko – Collaborating with teams on content strategy planning: pitfalls and best practices
- Alexandra White – Moving beyond empathy: a11y in documentation
- Anni Bond – Writing Backwards: Documenting the End-of-Life of a Product
- Jessica Garson – Creating Quality Sample Code
- Matthew Baldwin – Read the Rules: What technical writers can learn from board game design
- Luca Janssens – Finding the line: Balancing business continuity and documentation debt
- Ryan Paul – Documentation as an application: enabling interactive content that is tailored to the user
- Luc Perkins – Model-view-docs: taming large-scale documentation projects using structured data
- Lucy Carey – Globalise the docs
- Brooke Wayne – Don’t Fear Migration! How to Successfully Move Docs to a New Tool
- Shavindri Dissanayake (Shavi) – Why SDK Docs Matter — And What I’m Doing About It!
- Colin Dean – Building a content-focused, scientific document authoring workflow for Data Scientists and Engineers alike
- Sally Stumbo – Walking Backwards: Tracing the New Customer Journey from Finish to Start to Help Shape Content
- Dan Gunter – Where Documentation, Cloud-hosted Interactive Tutorials and Continuous Integration Testing Intersect
- Avi Flax – Set your data free with model-based architecture diagramming
Head over to the Speakers page to see the full abstracts. We hope there’s something there for everyone to enjoy, and also something that will broaden your horizons a bit.
Opportunity grant program¶
The grant program for WTD Portland 2020 supports people who would otherwise not be able to attend the conference by covering attendance costs. Applications are open to anyone who wants to attend Write the Docs. Grant applications are open until March 1st, 2020, Midnight PST.
Head over to Opportunity grants and apply.
Tickets are going fast!¶
If you don’t have your ticket yet, now’s a great time to snap one up. Conference tickets have sold out for the last several years, and they go faster along with the speaker announcement, so if you’re planning to come, don’t leave it to the last minute.
Planning your trip¶
In the next few weeks, we’ll be announcing more details about the conference events, including the full schedule, annual hike on Saturday afternoon, writing day and reception on Sunday. But on top of that, there’s ALL SORTS of stuff to do in Portland.
We’ve got a couple of excellent volunteers – Christy and Mo – who are heading up our Explore Portland committee. They’re already hard at work updating the the Visit Portland. Pop into the #wtd-conferences channel on Slack if you have any question.
Thanks to our sponsors¶
We are so grateful to have our sponsors help in bringing these events to life every year. Thanks sincerely to the following companies for supporting the Write the Docs community:
Head over to our sponsorship prospectus for details on how your company can get involved! We have several types of sponsorship available, including tables at the job fair that we’ll be hosting on Tuesday.
And that’s the latest on the Portland conference. We hope you’re all getting as excited as we are! Stay tuned for more details.
The Write the Docs Team
