Latest / The Not-Boring Tech Writer / Kate sounds off on community
Transcript
- Kate Mueller: [00:00:04] Welcome to The Not-Boring Tech Writer, a podcast sponsored by KnowledgeOwl. Together, we hear from other writers to explore writing concepts and strategies, deepen our tech writing skills, get inspired, and connect with our distinctly not-boring tech writing community. If you are passionate about documentation, you belong here, no matter your job title or experience level. Welcome. [00:00:29] Hello, lovely not-boring tech writers. I'm Kate Mueller, and this is one of our solo episodes where I share things I'm thinking about or working on. I'm recording this episode in the middle of April, during what may or may not be a ceasefire in Iran. First, my progress update. We just released our long-awaited redesign of the article editor. All new accounts will get the new article editor by default. For existing accounts, the new article editor layout will be opt-in while we get feedback and also figure out how to transition certain older accounts over to it. So in all the docs updates, I have to handle both the existing editor layout and the new editor layout. For now, I'm handling this need to document dual UI using two tactics. I have a snippet that I add above the instructions, which provides information on figuring out which version of the editor you're using, and then I'm constructing tabs for the old editor versus the new editor so people can get what they need without being distracted by what they don't. Kate Mueller: [00:01:32] I'll be able to use the snippet references to give myself a punch down list when we do move everyone over. So my audit list should mostly build itself. If you're using KnowledgeOwl and you want to see more about how I've done this so you can do something similar in your own knowledge base, toss us a comment or an email and we can do some kind of behind the scenes webinar on it or something. The next few months will be tricky, since I'll need to maintain both forms of documentation while both versions of the editor exist, and even when we do forcibly move everyone over to the new editor, we haven't updated the category editor yet, so I'll likely still need to handle the differences between the article and category editors for some of the options that appear in both. I went with a fairly minimal set of docs updates for the initial release, and I'll continue chipping away at all the remaining docs over the coming weeks and months. So far, I've made it through 81 articles at the time of this recording, and I have I don't even know how many remaining. At least 100 for the editor itself, plus, I'll need to review docs for all the features tied to the editor, and I haven't figured out what that looks like yet. It's all part of the fun, right? [00:02:46] My overall feeling on this has been two pronged. It's a great experience for our authors and it's a mountain of work on the documentation side. I love the experience we're giving our authors here. They can try out the new editor for a bit and toggle back to the old one if they don't like it while we continue to make updates and improvements. It also gives authors a chance to offer feedback, which helps us make sure the editor is growing in ways that feel good to our authors. We aren't forcing them into something that may still have some unintuitive behaviors or unidentified bugs, and when we do move them over, the editor experience will be hardened and improved by these weeks of feedback. But updating docs now for this transitionary period, knowing that I'll have to come back through again in the coming weeks or months to rip out all that transitionary content, it's always a bit frustrating knowing you're going to do the same work repeatedly. In this case, I'm glad to be doing it because the trade-off seems worthwhile, but it does make me a bit itchy to just be done with all of it. I also had to embrace the idea of not having my full set of docs updates ready for this initial release. It will likely take me at least a month to get through everything, and we didn't want to hold up author testing and feedback just for docs updates, but that meant I kept scaling back the scope of what docs had to be done, and I didn't even finish that limited scope. I ultimately okayed the release knowing I didn't have everything I wanted done, which isn't a great feeling, but I decided getting feedback from authors was more important than having all my docs in a row, and I am just going to play catch up for the next couple weeks, or however long that takes me. [00:04:32] And to be fair, part of my frustration is my own fault. My big project last year, which you're probably achingly familiar with if you've been listening to these solo episodes, after we updated the site nav and layout, I was updating the content hierarchy, all of the content, and much of the style of most of our feature related documentation. And those have been great changes, but they also took me a year to get through. And in that time, I never had time to make the same kinds of updates to the article editor documentation. And now that I finally have a house on fire reason to be in here, boy, have I found some interesting choices that former me made years ago about how these docs should be laid out. [00:05:20] In some cases, I've been able to accept that they're ugly and just update them in place to try to keep my scope smaller, but in others, that's been completely unworkable. I've been doing things like splitting single long pages into multiple smaller pages with more descriptive titles. I've added subcategories to more closely match the layout in the features subcategories. It's great work. They’re huge improvements to the documentation, but it does make some of these updates take longer than I anticipated. I just keep reminding myself of how much better the Features subcategories are now, and that ultimately, this work will pay huge dividends, and most likely no one will notice how slow this is going except me and maybe you, since you'll be hearing about it for however many months it takes me. I've also been keeping busy with some non-documentation work because I don't have enough to do, clearly. I created an internal shared Postman collection for the KnowledgeOwl API, and I led a lunch-and-learn for the team on how to use it, which was well-received. And I will be the coordinator for Writing Day at Write the Docs Portland, which will begin only a couple days after this episode drops. So I've also had meetings, work, and conversations for that role. [00:06:40] And of course, because it's a solo episode, I've also been reflecting on my interview with Eric Holscher, since we talked all about Write the Docs’ history and things Eric's learned over time doing it. Eric's interview made me think of just how simple and straightforward the inception story of Write the Docs was. The steps basically went something like this: first, they identified there was no true community or space for people who are passionate about documentation but not official tech writers. Nowhere for them to really share that passion. They'd recently started a product for documentation called Read the Docs, which is where the title of the Write the Docs came from. As they were lamenting this lack of community and space, they kicked around the idea of a conference hosted by Read the Docs. And somehow, in the process of kicking that idea around, Troy just built a website and announced that they now had a conference. They then borrowed ideas they really liked from other communities and institutions that they were a part of, to try to build something good. And that's it. It wasn't a big production, there was no extended analysis of product-market fit or which locations might be best. They actually had to change venues because of how many people they had register. They just saw an immediate need in their community, did something, and then began iterating on that. Since then, it's evolved quite significantly, and it was interesting to chat with Eric about the ways they're trying to keep the conference and community from being totally captured by tech writers, for example, to make sure it still includes and welcomes any passionate documentarian, regardless of job title. Kate Mueller: [00:08:23] And there's an interesting tension here between the ease of the initial creation and the ongoing friction of maintaining a growing, amorphous thing to try to keep it true to its values, while also giving it space to grow and evolve over time as people's needs change. There isn't a right answer to that tension, but I do believe it's a theme we all experience in our lives, like when the honeymoon phase of a relationship passes and you're just trying not to be annoyed by the way your partner chews, or when the company you've happily been at for years changes strategic direction or senior leadership, and you have to decide if that's a thing you still want to be a part of. I remain impressed at how Write the Docs has navigated that tension. I still find it to be a very welcoming and supportive community, and the conferences always leave me energized. That's a huge part of why I said yes to being staff and helping this year. And that also makes me think of another idea that came up in the interview. As Eric and I were talking, he mentioned how much he's realized that one of the institutions he most loves outside of the documentarian space, Lonely Planet, is now a shell of its former self after it got bought by a private equity firm. In the episode, I commented on the necessity of supporting institutions we believe in, and so this is a little bit of a mea culpa. Kate Mueller: [00:09:46] During the episode, I tied this idea to one of Ari Weinzweig's newsletters, but I actually dug into this after we recorded to try to figure out where I got the idea from, and I realized I had ultimately misattributed it. Ari does mention it in a couple newsletters, so it's mildly defensible, but he's actually quoting Timothy Snyder's book On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century, which I read a few months ago, so I have only my flawed human memory to blame for messing up the reference. But the piece I'm thinking of is from Snyder's lesson number two, which is called Defend Institutions. And in it he says, "It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of ‘our institutions’ unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other, unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about: a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union and take its side." I know the word institution often evokes negative feelings, but conferences or events are their own kind of institution, as are open source projects or communities, your local animal rescue organization, the sports bar you catch every game at, or that amazing ramen shop you love. We too easily forget that institutions are built and maintained by people. Kate Mueller: [00:11:24] And if the institution stops having people who support and care for it, it dies. In the US, we often view support for institutions as giving them our money, basically. But helping organizations can look much bigger than that. Those of us who volunteer or work at Write the Docs are helping that institution survive. And this has gotten me thinking a lot about what other institutions I want to see survive and thrive, so give some thought to the resources or spaces you most appreciate or value. If you use open source frameworks or systems, toss them a donation to help them keep the lights on, or submit a PR to fix a typo or a bug. If you enjoy a given conference or event, ask about volunteering or even donating directly to it. 2026 is a great year to help the institutions you care about, so they can weather the volatile reality we all live in. [00:12:19] This episode is sponsored by KnowledgeOwl, your team's next knowledge base solution. You don't have to be a technical wizard to use KnowledgeOwl. Our intuitive, robust features empower teammates of all feathers to spend more time on content and less time on administration. Learn more and sign up for a free 30-day trial at knowledgeowl.com. [00:12:42] I feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the idea of community, since that's a lot of what Eric and I talked about, but I'm going to maybe come at it a little bit sideways. Kate Mueller: [00:12:53] So I have already been thinking a lot about community, partially randomly, due to an email I received from Abby Covert, who's the author of How to Make Sense of Any Mess, which if you haven't read it, it's a fantastic resource on information architecture. I'll link to it in the show notes. Among other things, Covert runs a community called The Sensemakers Club, which grew out of the work she did with How to Make Sense of Any Mess. It's a member-run cooperative with a monthly membership fee. I'm not a member, but I am on her mailing list, so I periodically receive emails from her suggesting that I join. One of her recent emails talked about the fact that the word “community” can come with some negative baggage, especially when you're talking about paid access to a community. And she quotes one prospective member interview from earlier this year who said, "When I see the word community, I immediately get skeptical. Too many bad experiences with do-gooder seeming places that really just want your money." I've been thinking about this a lot lately of whether community is positive or negative, or of the ways that we can interpret it as positive and negative, because there are two forms that community can take. Two ends of a spectrum that all communities have to find a place on. Kate Mueller: [00:14:17] Eric touched on this during his episode. He noted that Write the Docs originally was sponsored by a company, Read the Docs, and then almost immediately, it became much more than that. It didn't really become about Read the Docs, it became this bigger community with its own sense of momentum. He noted that building something that has a community feel to it, it needs to feel like a home for people rather than a day at the office, that you have to center that idea of community as you make decisions. One of the questions he asked was, “How do you build a space where the excitement of something feels genuine and towards making everything better, versus trying to extract value?”. One of his solutions to this problem was to build and enforce community norms around the idea of the community providing value rather than extracting it. And therefore, the lack of sales pitches and those kinds of things, and so those community norms became self-reinforcing. People buy into the community's values and then work to uphold them. But that idea of providing value and genuine connection juxtaposed against the idea of extractive value, I think that feeling of extractive value is why the word “community” can leave a bad taste in our mouths, because we've been part of a community that claimed to be genuine but wasn't. [00:15:46] And to redeem myself, Ari Weinzweig did talk about this in a recent newsletter. The newsletter was titled “What It Means to Make Democracy in the Day to Day: Why the Power of Making Tops the Power of Taking.” I will link to it in the show notes. He says that the more we focus organizations or communities around the idea of making–whatever that might be, making a product or service, making art, making safe spaces, making food–the more making occurs, the less taking occurs. Whereas the more organizations focus around taking to benefit themselves, the less likely it is that making is happening. This, to me, was just another way of getting at the same dichotomy Eric talked about. I chew on the idea of community a lot, both with regards to this podcast, which I would love to think of as a community itself, albeit one with a whole lot of fairly quiet members. And with regards to the documentation I create for KnowledgeOwl. I suppose the more cynical take of what I do is that I'm creating podcast episodes and documentation to help KnowledgeOwl get and retain customers. That's not how I view it, that's not inspiring or motivating to me. Instead, I frame the work I do as trying to help support the technical writing community and to help KnowledgeOwl authors gain confidence and skills. I try to create episodes that feel like they add to the conversation, or introduce ideas or voices people may not know. Kate Mueller: [00:17:24] I overhaul my documentation because I want to make it easier for authors to find what they need quickly, so that I don't take extra time from them and they can get back to the stuff they want to do. I've started building toolkits and tutorials to help fill the gap on skills I see writers struggling with. So I'm firmly on the idea of community as making rather than taking. But what does all this community talk have to do with technical writing really, other than me trying to connect the dots? In the newsletter, Ari quotes Wendell Berry's book Life is a Miracle, which I'm just going to quote here verbatim: "Good artists are people who can stick things together so that they stay stuck. They know how to gather things into formal arrangements that are intelligible, memorable and lasting. Good forms confer health upon the things that they gather together. Farms, families and communities are forms of art, just as are poems, paintings, and symphonies. None of these things would exist if we did not make them. We can make them either well or poorly. This choice is another thing that we make." Berry's observation applies to both communities and documentation. Both take conscious effort to create and maintain. Both stick things together so that they stay stuck. And in the case of docs, so that they make sense, hopefully. Both are a formal arrangement that is hopefully intelligible, memorable, and somewhat lasting. Kate Mueller: [00:19:00] Both documentation and communities also don't fully exist unless we make some effort to make them. There's an art there. We make a choice about how we make our documentation just as we make choices about how to form our communities, what social norms those communities will enforce, and whether they'll be more focused on making and being beneficial or on taking and being extractive. It can sometimes feel like the world is adopting more of a ‘taking mindset’, and I appreciate the work Write the Docs does to embrace what I would call a 'making mindset', and that's a thing I'm trying to embrace more in the work I do, too. So this month, as I chug through the article editor docs updates, God only knows how many of them there are, I'm also thinking carefully about the ways I structure and split my documentation to create good entry points, either for my readers or the AI tools they're using to access my docs, to build forms that feel true to those needs, to choose to build things well, even if that takes a tiny bit longer. There's some inherent tension there between making the thing well and actually getting it done without it taking forever, but I think the effort is worthwhile. I'd much rather build something of value, and I hope this month you can join me in thinking creatively about ways the work you do can help make space or experiences or knowledge for the people who engage with it. Kate Mueller: [00:20:33] And to do that in ways that feel respectful of people's time and interests. As always, if you have ideas for topics or guests, if there's a bit of the tech writing world that your life would be improved by hearing an episode on, or if you'd just like to tell us what you're getting out of the show, please message us on LinkedIn or Bluesky @TheNotBoringTechWriter, or email tnbtw@knowledgeowl.com. You can also hit up thenotboringtechwriter.com and select ‘Suggest a Guest’ to recommend yourself or someone else as a new guest. [00:21:13] The Not-Boring Tech Writer is co-produced by our podcast Head of Operations, Chad Timblin, and me. Post-production is handled by the lovely humans at Astronomic Audio, with editing by Dillon, transcription by Madi, and general post-production support by Been and Alex. Our theme song is by Brightside Studio. Our artwork is by Bill Netherlands. You can order The Not-Boring Tech Writer t-shirts, stickers, mugs, and other merch from the “Merch” tab on thenotboringtechwriter.com. You can check out KnowledgeOwl's products at knowledgeowl.com. And if you want to work with me on docs, knowledge management, coaching, or revamping an existing knowledge base, go to knowledgewithsass.com. Until next time, I'm Kate Mueller and you are The Not-Boring Tech Writer.