Reps/SIGs/Evangelism Reps/Conference participation/Writers UA Central

Warning: With effect from 1st September 2023, the Mozilla Reps program was closed and activities ended.

Conference details

January 6-7, 2015, Austin TX. Small regional conference for technical writers, organized by Joe Welinske. About 40 attendees.

Links

Writers UA Central

Mozilla's participation at this event

Janet Swisher attended, did not present.

Your goals

My goals were to network with technical writers, and possibly learn about new issues in the technical communication field.

Audience type and size

Total conference attendance was about 40 people, almost entirely technical writers or team managers.

Evening event/party

There was an informal meetup the night before the conference in the hotel bar, and a sponsored happy hour (with appetizers) there after the first day. Seemed like less than half of attendees showed up for these.

Notable presentations

Good presentations on concise writing for mobile; terminology for touch UIs; tips for good videos; embedded help via JavaScript.

Don Day (one of the co-creators of DITA) is getting ready to release his DITA-based wiki framework called "ExpeDITA" on Github. (I missed his talk due to it having a title that made me think it was not relevant.) You can view an instance of ExpeDITA at Jotsom.com.

Other open projects attending (if applicable)

No other open source projects were represented. However, I did meet Dave Gash, who has written a lot on Web Platform Docs under contracts with Google and Microsoft.

Organization rating (1: bad - 10: excellent)

7

Overall feel of the event

The conference met my expectations of being a small conference for technical writers.

Was it worth it? Should we participate again?

Not worth flying to, but possibly worth attending or presenting, as professional development for technical writers.

Connections

I told Dave Gash I'd let him know if we have TW contract positions open.