In this solo episode, I share my latest content updates progress and reflect on my takeaways from Eric Holscher’s interview (S3:E34). I also share some thoughts on supporting institutions we care about and how to keep “community” from being an unpleasant word.

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KnowledgeOwl just released a major redesign of our article editor, so I’ve been spending a lot of time testing that redesign and preparing documentation updates for its release. Since the editor is initially opt-in for existing customers, I had to handle both the existing editor layout and the new editor layout in our documentation. I chose an introductory snippet to explain the difference and then manually built tabs for the instructions for each editor layout. I believe this gradual rollout before we move everyone over is a great experience for our authors, but it has definitely made the documentation process a lot more involved, since I know I’ll have to revisit these pages and update them again once we complete that forced rollout.

I reflect on my interview with Eric Holscher, co-founder of the Write the Docs conference. The conference had very humble, minimal roots: the founders all wanted a space for people passionate about documentation to come together and share ideas and then just decided to launch a conference. It grew organically over time. I finally tracked down where I got the idea of “supporting the institutions you care about” from my interview with Eric. Turns out it came from Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century, from his lesson titled “Defend Institutions.” Volunteering for something like Write the Docs is a form of defending an institution I care about, and I hope you can similarly find ways to defend the institutions you care about.

I also dig into the idea of community, especially on the fact that community exists on a spectrum between value-adding and value-extracting, which Eric mentioned in his interview. I introduce some ideas from Ari Weinzweig’s newsletter that recast this dichotomy as making and taking, and I explore ways that building community is like building documentation, tying these ideas to a quote from Wendell Berry.

In this episode:

• [00:00:44]: Progress updates
• [00:06:40]: Reflections on how Write the Docs first began
• [00:09:46]: Reflections on supporting the institutions we care about
• [00:12:42]: Reflections on the idea of community and building communities centered around making rather than taking

Resources discussed in this episode:

• KnowledgeOwl Support KB
• Building a home for documentarians with Eric Holscher (S3:E34)
• How to Make Sense of Any Mess by Abby Covert
• The Sensemakers Club
• On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century by Timothy Snyder
• Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition by Wendell Berry 
• “What It Means to Make Democracy in the Day to Day: Why the power of making tops the power of taking” by Ari Weinzweig

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