Write the Docs Community Board Quarterly Update Q3-2023

Greetings, documentarians! Mikey Ariel here, chairperson of the WTD community board. I’m happy to share with you the third quarterly update for 2023.

To catch up on the previous quarterly updates, check out Q1 blog post and Q2 blog post.

Q3 quarterly meeting highlights

Our third meeting covered several topics:

Meetup organizer mailing list and survey

This year the Meetup team is focusing on updating organizer resources and streamlining communication. To support our efforts, the Meetup team lead Rose Williams created an organizer mailing list and distributed a meetup activity survey. The survey assessed meetup activity and collected ideas for evolving the local and regional meetup structure.

We appreciate all of the hard work that meetup organizers do to keep their communities engaged, and will continue to work with the meetup teams to adapt to the current the global landscape. If you want to start a new meetup or join an existing meetup, check out the Meetups page on our website.

Slack channel naming and structure
Last year, the Slack Moderation team started working on a proposal to restructure the Slack channels and establish naming conventions. Since then, the initiative was set aside due to changing availability, but the community board agreed that there are community benefits to restarting that effort, so we will be crafting a WEP (Write the Docs Enhancement Proposal) and posting it soon on our WEP repository for community review.
Team lead communication channels
As a part of our continuous improvements to the organizational administration, we decided to create official WTD Google accounts for all team leads. This will enable them to interact with the community with WTD email addresses, and provide them with the ability to create google groups for their teams. These groups can be used for mailing lists (such as the meetup organizer mailing list) and Google Drive access for team and event resources.
2023 salary survey
Now that the 2022 salary survey is published, we’re starting to work on the next survey with Kay Smoljak, our-long term survey expert! Expect the survey to be opened around the Atlantic conference timeframe.

And as always, the board continues to review the community backlog to determine what are the most valuable efforts for the community in the short and long term.

What is the community board

The Community Board exists to curate the overall strategic direction of the community teams.

The board members are team leads for each WTD team, as well as the conference chairs of our various conferences:

  • Mikey Ariel (CoreOps, Brand and design, board chair)
  • Eric Holscher (CoreOps, Portland chair)
  • Samuel Wright (CoreOps, Infrastructure)
  • Sasha Romijn (CoreOps, Support, Atlantic chair)
  • Rose Williams (Meetups)
  • Janine Chan (Slack moderation)
  • Aaron Collier (Newsletter)
  • Swapnil Ogale (Australia chair)

The community board meets quarterly in real-time, and provides monthly asynchronous status updates. Board members can share the status of what they’re working on and request any help to keep the various teams functioning effectively.

Thank you

Thanks again to the team leads that participate in the community board, and to all the team members (mostly volunteers!) who work diligently to support the community and each other. If you want to join any of the WTD community teams, check out the Team page for team descriptions and contacts.

See you in the next quarterly update!

Mikey and the community board