Sample email¶

Remember to change the things in [brackets]!

FROM: [your name]

TO: [your employer or manager’s name]

SUBJECT: Professional Development: Documentation Community Conference

I’d like to attend Write the Docs in Portland, 19-21 May 2019. This three-day event explores the art and science of documentation, and covers a diverse range of topics related to documentation in the software industry.

Write the Docs conferences bring together everyone who writes the docs – Tech Writers, Developers, Developer Relations, Customer Support – making the events an ideal networking opportunity. Each conference successfully combines a number of different event formats to deliver engaging, practical, and timely content.

There is a single track of talks, a parallel unconference event, and a community writing day. The sessions from 2018 will give you a good idea of the kinds of topics covered, many of which are relevant to my work.

Costs:

• Conference ticket (includes breakfast and lunch) - $500

• Travel – [fill in with estimate]

• Accommodation – – [fill in with estimate]

Benefits:

• Discovering solutions to problems I’m facing at work

• Exposure to the latest ideas, techniques, and tools for software docs

• Opportunity to learn from the best doc teams in the industry

• Building professional connections with other documentarians

Thanks in advance, [your name]

Resources¶

When discussing how to pitch the conference, a few generally helpful tips emerged:

• Highlight a few specific talks that relate to ongoing projects at work. (This one’s dependent on pitching after the talk line up has been announced).

• If your company is looking to hire another documentarian, the job fair and networking at the event are an excellent resource.

• Don’t forget that one of the benefits to your attendance is that it raises the visibility of your company in the community. If your team wants a reputation for caring about their docs, having people at Write the Docs is a great way to do that.

In addition, it can be useful to share some info about previous conferences. You can find the websites for previous events on Conferences, and a quick list of last year’s talks down below. But perhaps more useful might be some of the info in our Press Kit, which includes community testimonials, photos, and more.

This year’s talks¶

• Making interactive narrative storytelling accessible to everyone by Paris Buttfield-Addison

• Being a user’s documentarian: Studying user’s behavior and then defining a strategy for documentation. by Payal Dhiman

• Supercharge your writing process with a designer’s toolkit by Rachel Robins

• Rethinking Release Notes by Alexander Koren

• Minimal Viable Product - What does this mean for user documentation by Nithya Krishnan

• Knowledge Is Power: Documentation as a tool for equity and inclusion by Riona MacNamara

• Through the looking glass - how user testing can give technical writers better perspective by Fraser Mitchell

• Your First Book - Doesn’t have to be rocket science! by Akhil Behl

• The amazing, fantastic human bias that makes you bang your head on your desk by Leticia Mooney

• Creating API documentation for international communities by Alec Clews

• Information architecture for documentation by Elle Geraghty

• TheGoodDocsProject - Doc Fixit by Cameron Shorter

• Kubeflow open source docs need your help! by Sarah Maddox

• Git the Docs - A fun, hands-on introduction to version control by Becky Todd

• Tech Writing 101 Workshop by Sarah Maddox