Attend the "Solve This!" Write the Docs Meetup tomorrow (June 23, 2016)
Meetup description
Here’s a description of the meetup:
For this meetup, we will help each other with the challenges that we face at work. Here’s how it we will do this. You add a major challenge that you have to the list here. The list is anonymous. The challenge should be a problem that you haven’t been able to solve yourself. During the meetup, we will go through each of the challenges on the list and share opinions about the best solutions.
For more details, see the Write the Docs meeting announcement. The meetup location is in Daily City at Genesys.
I’m really curious to see how this theme turns out. About a decade ago, I organized a similar meeting at a Utah STC group that involved about 7 people sitting around a table in a library interacting in the same way – sharing problems, providing input, etc. One person told me it was the best meeting she had ever attended.
Overall, we’re trying to steer WTD meetups toward more creative, interactive formats. In the back of my mind, I have an idea that meetups should be like clubs, where friends with similar interests get together to hang out, talk with each other, and share ideas, frustrations, and advice, and more with a loose format and semi-open agenda.
Somehow over the years, the technical writing meetings (from STC to other organizations) evolved into presentations. While a presentation on a timely subject by an expert can be engaging, I think the presentation format is overdone. One of the reasons why people like the open-discussion format of the TC Camp unconference so much is precisely because it rejects the presentation format in favor of a more interactive, user-to-user discussion approach.
