Rewrite the Docs!: Field Notes from the Radical IT department¶
Description
Years of being one of the "technical people" in activist circles resulted in my being continually called on to help community groups and fellow organizers understand and more correctly wield technology in service of their mission. Using my blogpost "Three Tips for Providing Tech Help to Non-Profits and Other Such Organizations" as a point of departure, I will share my experience and derived best practices.
From "basics", like how to use documents and spreadsheets, to working with databases and understanding security, I have given assistance to a great many groups and the most important part is always the documentation that I leave behind. I can rarely ever just point people to the official software or open source project documentation, I almost always have to rewrite the docs for them in simple language that references their specific use case.
I wish to help community and activist groups make better technical choices so that they feel more in control of the technologies they use. My hope is that in sharing my experiences, I can engage in a deeper dialogue with the technical documentation community about how we can make technical documentation more accessible, easier to reuse, and empowering.
- Conference: Write the Docs PORTLAND
- Year: 2018
