Open Help Conference and Sprints

At the docs chat last week I raised the possibility of having a documentation sprint at the Open Help Conference in Cincinnati in June. The conference is two days on 15th & 16th June, followed by a three day documentation sprint from 17th – 19th June. The great thing about doing it here is that we get to meet and learn from other OS documentation projects such as Mozilla and Gnome. Also, the venue and all of the practicalities are taken care of for us. We’ve just got to write.

I would like to bring a team of WordPress people out there to run a documentation sprint to tackle the following tasks:

• completing the theme and pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party developer handbooks
• populating and organising the new code reference
• possible other project depending on who attends and how many people we have.

The aim is for high impact in a short space of time. I’m open to suggestions for other projects so please feel free to run them by me.

I’m looking for both writers and developers to come along. So if you’re a developer and you’ve always wanted to get involved with docs, we would love to have you.

There will be some funding available but this will be largely for people who have already gotten involved with the WordPress project. I have gotten in touch with some WordPress businesses already, who have said that they will send an employee. So ask your boss – or ask me to ask your boss 🙂

If you run a WordPress business and you’re reading this, this is a great opportunity for an employee to improve their documentation skills while giving back to the project.

If you are planning to come, please keep in mind that this will be a working trip. You will be writing for three days, although we should have time to to squeeze in a bit of fun somewhere (not that writing documentation isn’t fun!)

Please fill in one of these two forms:

• I want to come and I don’t need funding
• I want to come and I need financial assistance

I’m going to be figuring out my budget this weekend so the application for financial assistance will close on Saturday 22nd April, 23:00 UTC. I’m happy to answer any questions on the thread here, or in the chat on Thursday.

Note: please don’t book tickets to the conference until everything is finalised

#open-help, #sprint