Writing Day¶
Each year we run an event called the Writing Day during the conference. This event is modeled after the concept of sprints, which are common in open-source conferences. The main premise is to get a bunch of interesting people in a room together and have them work towards shared goals.
To make the most out of the Writing Day, we recommend that you either come with a project, or be ready and willing to contribute to someone else’s project.
Here are some examples of projects that you might want to work on:
- Open source software documentation
- General documentation writing
- Best practices manual (For your company, or the world)
- Blog posts
- Tips and tricks
- Great works of fiction
- Love letters
- The Documentarian Manifesto
You get the idea.
All this adds up to a room full of smart people sharing your problems, your passion, and your goals. So be ready to learn some new things and to teach others what you know.
Even if you feel as though you don’t know that much, we know you have a lot to offer. Come surprise yourself with how much you can share.
Documenting a new project?¶
Check out our beginners guide to writing documentation. This should help you get started, and give you some ideas for how you can contribute to a project that you love.
Logistics¶
Please bring a computer or some other mechanism with which to create written words. We’ll be creating and editing content, so make sure that you have the tools you need to contribute.
Schedule¶
- Date & Time: Sunday, September 11, 10:00-18:00 CEST.
- Location: Online conference platform.
Your Project Here¶
The Good Docs Project¶
The Good Docs Project is an open source community of technical writers, doc tools experts, and software engineers who are committed to improving the quality of documentation in open source by creating the templates, tools, and resources to empower everyone to create great docs. Come visit our table at Writing Day to provide feedback and collaborate with some of the project leaders on some of our key 2022 initiatives. We’ll provide a Google Doc with specific agenda with times for each session on Writing Day.
- Project overview and Q&A - We’ll start our Writing Day with a high-level introduction to the project followed by a Q&A session.
- Template roadmap workshop - The flagship initiative of our project is to create templates that can be used by both technical writers and non-technical writers to create high quality documentation. In this workshop, you’ll participate in a fun, hands-on brainstorming activity to help us decide what templates we should add to our roadmap next. We’ll close out this segment by showing you our roadmap and talking about how you can get involved to make the roadmap a reality if you’d like to contribute to the project beyond Writing Day.
- Template review workshop - We have a few templates that are ready for a deeper review from the wider community. Come join this segment of Writing Day to provide feedback on our API Reference template, How To template, Code of Conduct template, and more.
- Chronologue workshop - We’re building out a new documentation site for a mock tool called The Chronologue, a telescope that can view astronomical events in different dimensions of time and space. Our documentation site will showcase our templates in action and hopefully provide a good example of excellent documentation in action. Come to this workshop to look at a product mock-up of the Chronologue and talk more about how you could be involved.
- Style guide working session - We recently created an editorial board to review our templates for consistency and to share innovations and lessons learned about creating templates with the rest of the template-writing community. Come join this session to help us set up our first stub style guide (based on one of our templates, of course!) and help us add some recent decisions we’ve made to the guide. We’d also like your feedback and insights on how to hold effective style decision meetings.
- Website feedback help - Our project website needs help and we know it! Come join this session to provide feedback on our website and talk about how we can redesign the website to better meet the needs of our users and community members.
Write the Docs Meetups¶
Organizing local Write the Docs meetup communities is a rewarding way to participate. During Writing Day, we’ll have a table where we can share tips and best practices, especially in this time where all of our meetups are virtual.
During the conference¶
Check out the Writing Day Cheat Sheet for a quick reference that you can use during the conference to make the most out of Writing Day.
