2014 Sessions
Want to show the world what you’ve been working on? Email your proposal to conf@openhelp.cc. We’re interested in any topic related to documentation, support, and open communities. In particular, we’re excited to see talks related to the following:
Engaging user communities to create user-generated content, managing contributions and contributors, and getting people excited about helping other users.
Running effective documentation sprints, either in-person or remotely.
Making documentation available to everybody through better internationalization, localization, and accessibility.
The Open Help Conference has a heavy focus on open discussion, so we prefer presentations that foster discussion and collaboration. Plan to speak for 45 minutes. Proposals are evaluated as they come in, so send your proposal as soon as possible.
Featured Presentations
Help people so they can help you
Fostering and sustaining a community of volunteer writers is a big job. It’s not enough to simply capture their attention; you have to keep it, and you have to make it easy for them to find appropriate, useful tasks they can accomplish.
During this talk, you’ll learn about the latest ways Mozilla is engaging with its community of writers, as well as the tools we’ve built (and continue to build) to make it easier for contributors to find things to do that are appropriate to their skills and availability.
RTFM? Write a better FM!
While Laziness, Impatience and Hubris might be the virtues of a programmer, Diligence, Patience and Humility are the virtues of a great docs writer. Rich shares some insights gleaned from 15 years of working on documentation and answering the newbies.
Community Lessons From IRL
After over a decade of building online communities around open source projects, Shaun got entangled in an effort to open a grocery co-op in his neighborhood. He’ll share his experiences in building communities in real life, how they differ from online communities, and how many principles of community-building are always the same.
Demos and Briefs
Do you have something you want to show off, or something quick to say without preparing a full talk? We have slots for demos and brief talks. Briefs can be as short as a few minutes or as long as 15 minutes, but be prepared for questions. Email conf@openhelp.cc with a short description.
Rewriting Markdown Documents into Mallard: Check Lists
Jana Svarova
How to assist the reader to grasp not only the amount of information but also the order in which the information should be read and processed? How to provide the reader with logical and clear structure that would lead them linearly in the topic-based manner?
On the example of rewriting checklists into Mallard, this brief talk demonstrates various uses of this markup language, which allows for writing even less usual document types. The talk focuses on the Mallard strengths in general as well as particular implementation details.