Conference, Collaboration, and Cincinnati: Open Help Conference Reflection

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August 21, 2017


Open Help is a conference designed to help documentation writers learn about new tools and share writing insights. Dru, Warren, and I represented FreeBSD, iXsystems, and its open source projects. Other conference attendees represented the GNOME, KDE/Kubuntu, and RedHat open source projects. Hosted in an historic part of Cincinnati, the conference was lightly attended, but bursting with ideas and opportunities to exchange knowledge. The best method to summarize this enlightening meeting of the minds is with three “C”s: Conference, Collaboration, and Cincinnati.
Open Help began like many other conferences: thanking sponsors, introductions, and icebreakers. However, because the conference was smaller, we immediately moved beyond these pleasantries to gain a deeper understanding of each other’s documentation. Warren Block gave presentations describing many common pitfalls of documentation and the process of improving the FreeBSD translation project. Conference organizer Sean McCance presented an in-depth examination of the GNOME tools used to provide help text and broader documentation to users. These presentations provided a perfect transition to the collaborative phase of the conference.
An additional element of the conference was the spirit of cooperation between all participants. On a “meta” note, I was impressed and encouraged to see that despite our differences, writers for very different projects in the Linux and BSD world were able to easily collaborate. I personally gained several insights to greatly improve our Sphinx documentation by integrating Git submodules into our docs structure and look to the robust GNOME documentation search tools to replace our existing less-than-useful Sphinx search. We all engaged in animated conversations about the strengths and weaknesses of documentation tools and markup formats, both during the conference and as we explored Cincinnati after conference hours.
The venue for Open Help was in the historic Over-the-Rhine (OTR) district of Cincinnati. As old as the city itself, OTR was known at one time as the hub for brewing, pork, and German culture in the United States. Falling into disrepair in the early 20th century, it is now reviving back into a major “core” of Cincinnati. Our venue was Union Hall, an aged beer hall rebuilt into a beautiful tech/startup business support facility. Surrounding the venue are numerous small shops and eateries, all offering a myriad of tasty foods and locally brewed beverages. One interesting extracurricular activity was touring the recently rediscovered underground brewing facilities. This was an excellent opportunity to learn about this fascinating city. No less fascinating was the conference.
To conclude, Open Help is a great conference! Set in a beautiful and interesting city, it provides an excellent opportunity for technical writers and those interested in better documentation to improve their skills and collaborate with other top-flight writers in this field.
Tim Moore, Technical Documentation Writer

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