Write the Docs Australia - Community management

Context

Write the Docs is a global community of people who care about documentation. We consider everyone who cares about communication, documentation, and their users to be a member of our community. This can be programmers, tech writers, developer advocates, customer support, marketers, and anyone else who wants people to have great experiences with software.

Contribution

While we have had other communities in Australia that covered technical documentation sporadically, there was no community for like- minded people to get together and talk about documentation issues. I have been part of other groups that organised technical writing events and conferences in the past, but in 2016, none of these groups existed and there was a serious gap in community events.

I initiated the Write the Docs community in Australia in June 2016 and started organising meetup events around Australia, along with a lot of help from friends from my writing network. We started organising meetup events in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane from Sept 2016 and have so far have organised over 75 events across Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, and online.

In Nov 2017, I also organised the first Write the Docs Australia day event that included presentations and half a day of documentation sprints.

Over the last 8 years, I have chaired, and organised 6 conferences in:

These conferences have been attended by over 900 people and featured speakers from a large number of organisations, including from Australia, Europe, USA, India, Singapore and Vietnam.

Conference wrangler

My role across these conferences:

  • Led volunteer teams working on organising the conference.
  • Handled budgets, schedule, and planning for the conference.
  • Managed sponsorships and online conference platform/venue for the event.
  • Coordinated logistics, catering, and swag/marketing material.

Project link: https://www.meetup.com/Write-the-Docs-Australia/

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