Lead a Project¶

Leading a project at Writing Day is a wonderful opportunity to engage with documentarians from a variety of backgrounds, experience, and expertise. Their collective wealth of experience can help upgrade your documentation and create a more inclusive project. This empowers all of us to work together to create opportunities for each other and bigger, better communities.

Tips to create and lead a new project effectively:

• Provide a project overview with a specific focus or goals: Your project overview is a 2-minute pitch (when read aloud) that describes your project and clearly defines a focus area or goal. Here’s a good example from Writing Day 2022: the Open Web Docs project.
• Pre-label tasks and issues: Create a specific event label and label documentation tasks and issues. This empowers new contributors to find tasks that interest them.
• Create a task filter: This helps contributors track and find issues more easily and see which issues have already been assigned.
• Provide a clear onboarding process: Ensure your ReadMe, contribution guidelines, or onboarding instructions are accurate and up to date.
• Add your project to the Writing Day project list: Adding your project to the list promotes your project to our attendees before the event. Many attendees have told us that their curiosity about certain projects incentivised their attendance.
• Invite project experts to attend: We recommend having 1-2 project experts on your project. We love our developer advocates, community managers, and subject matter experts! You’re welcome to call for virtual reinforcements from your community as well.
• Practice flexibility and understanding: Remember, some attendees may need additional info to successfully onboard to your project.

These are suggestions and not requirements. It is perfectly valid to show up to Writing Day, tell us about your project the day of, and ask for volunteers! It’s been done before and it will be done again.

Contribute to a Project¶

Writing Day is the perfect opportunity to learn about new projects and technologies. Some attendees stay at one table all day, others table-hop. Do what feels right to you.

Check out the project list! Keep in mind that some attendees choose to announce their projects during Writing Day, so their project information would not be available on the project list.

Tips to contribute to a project:

• No matter your experience level, you are welcome! We are glad you’re here. Even if you feel you don’t have the right skills or experience or have never attended an event like Writing Day before, you’ll be surprised how much you can share.
• Check out our guide to writing documentation. Our beginners guide will help you get started, and give you some ideas for how you can contribute to a project.
• Ask people for help if you have a question. If at any time you get stuck with new concepts and tools, you are in a room full of friendly people from diverse backgrounds and experiences. If you are not sure who to ask, ask the Welcome Wagon or Registration staff or volunteers. We will help you find someone!

Mutual Aid for Tech Writer/Documentarian Job Hunters¶

Join project organizer, Kenzie Woodbridge (they/them), during the second Writing Day session.

Let’s help each other get ready for our job searches! Are you thinking of applying for new or different tech writer/documentarian jobs and would appreciate feedback on your resume? Or, are you responsible for hiring and know what you’re looking for in a resume and application?

Let’s get together and offer each other some feedback on the important documentation we’re using to move our careers forward.

WTD Meetup resources for organizers¶

Join project organizer, Rose Williams, for the second Writing Day session.

Our goal is to update the content infrastructure, consolidate resources, and add templates to better support Write the Docs Meetup organizers.

Agenda:

• Strategize to create a better content infrastructure for Meetup related pages.
• Update the Starting a Meetup page
• Update the Make your Meetups more sustainable page
• Review the Meetup FAQ

I recommend contributing to this project using the built in GitHub web-based editor. Mostly because I am not a Git or GitHub expert.

Audinux - Plan and Publish a User Guide (All day)¶

Join project organizer, Hank Lee, during Writing Day.

Plan and Publish User Guide for Audinux, a repository for FOSS music applications and plugins

Audinux is a repository for FOSS music applications and plugins. We want to empower creative people and help them use Audinux to its full potential! To do that, we need documentarians to help us create a user guide.

Our Writing Day goal is to work together and create a user guide for Audinux. Creating a user guide will positively impact our users and encourage new users.

Our plan is to create new documentation pages within the ‘User Guide’ templates, check out our project repository. This means you can contribute using the GitHub web editor or using whatever Git-workflow from your favorite local writing setup and text editor.

Check out the Audinux issue tracker. During Writing Day you are encouraged to select a ticket to work on, that is the best place to track the work you’ve done and ask any specific questions.

Session 1:

• Introduction to Audinux
• Intended audience
• Content type
• Tools for publication
• End to end processes
• Template: Initial configuration for music creation (Instrument: Electric guitar)
• Audio tools

Session 2:

• How to find right Audio/Music packages for your creative work
• Audio Plug-ins

Topics to choose from:

• How to find subpackages that complement plugins and install subpackages
• How to load plugins to DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and OBS Studio
• Rack and patchbay
• Use cases: Home recording

We are looking for anyone interested in this effort to join us.