From Me to Us: Building a docs team from the ground up
Clarendon Room A | Tue 14 Mar 3:45 p.m.–4:30 p.m.
Presented by
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Lana has been playing with technology since the days when she lusted desperately after a Hypercolor t-shirt. She's no longer interested in the t-shirt, but the technology bit stuck, and she's now been working as a technical writer and manager for over fifteen years. A pedant since birth, Lana will quite happily lecture anyone for hours on the finer points of grammar, style, information architecture, and content strategy, if only people will stand still long enough. She recently had a mid-life crisis, which entailed buying an electric vehicle, kicking out her teenage daughter, and driving the car interstate to move in with her partner in Sydney. She still owns the cat and the Kitchenaid. The Roomba didn't make the cut.
Abstract
There are currently 1,018 members of the #lone-writer channel on the Write the Docs Slack. That’s (presumably) 1,018 people who are the only documentation person in their company or organisation. 1,018 people who need to handle all the planning, researching, drafting, writing, editing, updating, and maintenance for the documentation created by an entire organisation all by themselves. And that’s without even mentioning all the managing upwards, education and outreach to other areas of the organisation, and pointless meetings that are also part of everyday life in a modern corporate enterprise. Not all of these people will be lone writers forever, though: what happens when, sometimes after many months or years of asking politely, nagging, or even begging, you get approval to hire another writer? Or even build a whole team?
Going from one lone writer to a team of two, or five, or twenty, brings with it a whole host of challenges. Some of them are obvious, like who reports to whom, how to get your team talking to each other, how do we organise and apportion work, and what collaboration tools should we use. Other challenges you might not expect until you encounter them, like how do we make sure that our team is available in multiple time zones, and how do make sure we don’t silo knowledge in single individuals?
Lana is currently building out her third documentation team (or fourth, depending on how you count it!), and will share the knowledge accumulated over many organisations, community groups, and seventeen years of documentation management.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVaC2YZYsp0
LA Archive: http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/everythingopen/2023/clarendon_room_a/Tuesday/From_Me_to_Us_Building_a_docs_team_from_the_ground_up.webm
There are currently 1,018 members of the #lone-writer channel on the Write the Docs Slack. That’s (presumably) 1,018 people who are the only documentation person in their company or organisation. 1,018 people who need to handle all the planning, researching, drafting, writing, editing, updating, and maintenance for the documentation created by an entire organisation all by themselves. And that’s without even mentioning all the managing upwards, education and outreach to other areas of the organisation, and pointless meetings that are also part of everyday life in a modern corporate enterprise. Not all of these people will be lone writers forever, though: what happens when, sometimes after many months or years of asking politely, nagging, or even begging, you get approval to hire another writer? Or even build a whole team? Going from one lone writer to a team of two, or five, or twenty, brings with it a whole host of challenges. Some of them are obvious, like who reports to whom, how to get your team talking to each other, how do we organise and apportion work, and what collaboration tools should we use. Other challenges you might not expect until you encounter them, like how do we make sure that our team is available in multiple time zones, and how do make sure we don’t silo knowledge in single individuals? Lana is currently building out her third documentation team (or fourth, depending on how you count it!), and will share the knowledge accumulated over many organisations, community groups, and seventeen years of documentation management. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVaC2YZYsp0 LA Archive: http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/everythingopen/2023/clarendon_room_a/Tuesday/From_Me_to_Us_Building_a_docs_team_from_the_ground_up.webm