https://www.writethedocs.org/ 2026-03-10T09:00:35.527908+00:00 ABlog https://www.writethedocs.org/blog/2026-Q1-community-board/ 2026-03-02T00:00:00+00:00 Mikey Ariel <section id="write-the-docs-community-board-quarterly-update-q1-2026"> <p>Greetings, documentarians! Mikey Ariel here, chairperson of the WTD community board. I’m happy to share our first quarterly update for 2026.</p> <p>To catch up on previous quarterly updates, check out the <a class="reference external" href="https://www.writethedocs.org/blog/archive/tag/community-board/">community board blog posts</a> archive.</p> <section id="q1-2026-meeting-highlights"> <h2>Q1-2026 meeting highlights</h2> <p>Since this is our first meeting of the year (marking the beginning of our third year of operation as a board, happy boardaversary!), we prepared for the meeting by checking in with the various team leads to find out how the board operations might be improved so that we can better support the teams and the community as a whole.</p> <p><strong>New initiative: Community content spotlight</strong></p> <p>Over the years, we’ve seen lots of wonderful content published by our documentarians, and occasionally we’d be approached by community members who wish to showcase their content. A while ago we launched the #community-showcase Slack channel, which is well-attended but only reaches WTD Slack members.</p> <p>On the other hand, the well-loved newsletter, led by Aaron Collier and a wonderful team of volunteers, has been our way to collect pertinent topics from our Slack space and share them on our mailing lists. The newsletter has grown to have some sponsored content and job postings, but still focused only on Slack-generated content.</p> <p>As our global experiment for the year, we’re investigating a mechanism to periodically collect and publish a spotlight of external content that our documentarians have published on their personal sites or other publications. The goal is to curate WTD community content from outside of our Slack spaces and share them with our mailing lists in some way.</p> <p>The details of this initiative are still being workshopped, but it is likely to involve new editorial staff who will collaborate with the newsletter team as well as the CFP team, led by Samuel Wright. We’d love to leverage or repurpose existing systems that we already use and love, and provide our community another method to share their wealth of knowledge and insight with each other.</p> <p><strong>WTD Australia and beyond</strong></p> <p>Since the Australia conference is on hiatus, Swapnil Ogale, the conference chair, has been pursuing possible expansions of the community in APAC in order to build on the foundation in Australia and India. There are many wonderful documentation communities in nearby countries such as Singapore, Japan, and Korea, and Swapnil will be investing time this year in building new relationships with those communities.</p> <p>If you are a member of or have connections to documentation-related communities in APAC and would like to grow a WTD presence in those regions, please reach out to Swapnil on Slack.</p> <p><strong>Newsletter team evolution</strong></p> <p>The newsletter team has been going through some personnel changes during the last year. Some members have departed, while new members have been onboarding. Aaron raised the topic of the next phase of the team and we discussed possible solutions for new long-term volunteers.</p> <p>We are also looking into possible ways to expand and diversify the newsletter content, including meetup write-ups and other topics of interest from the community. We hope that the newsletter will continue to serve our community in ways that will also support the team’s sustainability.</p> <p><strong>Quarterly meeting format and focus</strong></p> <p>Since the community board members cover many, MANY time zones, scheduling a time slot for our quarterly meeting has always been a challenge. Our team leads have been exemplary in their dedication, often sacrificing late-nights or early-morning hours to participate.</p> <p>However, this proved to be challenging for focused and targeted discussions, so we decided to split the board meeting from a single 1hr meeting that’s either late-night or early morning for about half of the board, into 2x30min meetings on the same day for each time zone grouping.</p> <p>Team leads can now choose which meeting they prefer to attend on that day, and thanks to AI note-keeping we are able to capture and share information with each other on Slack/email after the meetings.</p> <p>As always, the board continues to review the community backlog to determine the most valuable efforts for the community in the short and long term.</p> </section> <section id="what-is-the-community-board"> <h2>What is the community board</h2> <p>The <a class="reference external" href="https://www.writethedocs.org/team/#community-board">community board</a> exists to curate the overall strategic direction of the community teams.</p> <p>The board members are team leads for each WTD team, as well as the conference chairs of our various conferences:</p> <ul class="simple"> <li><p>Mikey Ariel (CoreOps, brand and design, board chair)</p></li> <li><p>Eric Holscher (CoreOps, Portland chair)</p></li> <li><p>Samuel Wright (CoreOps, infrastructure)</p></li> <li><p>Sasha Romijn (CoreOps, support, Atlantic chair)</p></li> <li><p>Rose Williams (meetups)</p></li> <li><p>Janine Chan (Slack moderation)</p></li> <li><p>Aaron Collier (newsletter)</p></li> <li><p>Swapnil Ogale (Australia chair)</p></li> </ul> <p>The community board meets quarterly to share what they’re working on and request any help to keep the various teams functioning effectively.</p> </section> <section id="thank-you"> <h2>Thank you</h2> <p>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 <a class="reference external" href="https://www.writethedocs.org/team/">Team page</a> for team descriptions and contacts.</p> <p>See you in the next update, and wishing everyone a joyous and productive 2026!</p> <p>Mikey and the community board</p> </section> </section>

Greetings, documentarians! Mikey Ariel here, chairperson of the WTD community board. I’m happy to share our first quarterly update for 2026.

2026-03-02T00:00:00+00:00