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 Lewis¶
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.
Swapnil Ogale¶
Swapnil initiated Write the Docs in Australia in 2016. He is fortunate enough to live in one of the world’s most liveable cities - Melbourne, Australia. While he is not travelling, trying out new food or building a mini library by visiting bookshops and fairs, he works as a technical writer at Amazon Web Services Australia.
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.
Primary Roles¶
- Conference chair - Eric Holscher
- Emcee - Janine Chan & Swapnil Ogale
- Stage manager - Samuel Wright
- Event manager - Katie Janovec
- Unconference coordinator - Ingrid Towey
- Lightning Talk coordinator - Rose Williams
- Writing Day coordinator - Rose Williams
- Welcome Wagon coordinators - Christy Lutz, Alicia Lewis, Mo Nishiyama, David Bastedo
- Social media coordinator - Mo Nishiyama
- Volunteer coordinator - Katie Janovec
- Sponsorship coordinator - Eric Holscher
- Job Fair coordinator - Eric Holscher
- Infrastructure coordinator - Sasha Romijn
- Opportunity Grant coordinator - Sasha Romijn
- Swag coordinator - Katie Janovec & Mikey Ariel
- Registration coordinator - Katie Janovec
- Code of conduct response - See code of conduct page
You can read descriptions of all the roles in our Event Roles doc.
