Tech Writer’s Tribe started its journey to strengthen the technical writers’ community on March 28, 2020 with webinars and online knowledge-sharing sessions. The journey continues……….

The Online Impact

• 130+ consecutive weekends of events
• 70+ presenters from India and abroad
• 12,000+ technical writers, API Documentation writers, and UX Writers as participants
• 80+ volunteers to contribute for the cause of community building
• TWT teams in multiple cities (Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Pune, Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata) and regions (such as NCR, Kerala and Gujarat)

The Road Ahead: In-Person Conferences

With the world opening up after the COVID era, TWT is hosting in-person city-based conferences for Tech Writers. After Hyderabad (Aug 20), Bengaluru (Aug 27), Pune (Sept 17), NCR (Nov 12), the 5th conference of 2022 is scheduled to be hosted at Chennai on Dec 3, 2022.

The Conference

Tech Writer’s Tribe (TWT) invites all technical writers to join their first in-person conference in Chennai.

• The Venue: Hotel Royal Plaza, 3, Koyambedu Market E Rd, near Omni Bus Terminus, Omni Bus Terminus, Virrugambakkam, Koyambedu, Chennai, Tamil Nadu 600107
• Location: Located in-between Koyambedu Omini Private Bus Terminus and Koyambedu Wholesale Market Complex. Koyambedu Omini Private Bus Terminus
• The Date: Dec 3 2022
• The Time: 9.30 AM – 6.00 PM IST

The Organising Committee

Any event involves a lot of hard work. TWT is glad to have city volunteers who give their best efforts to make an event successful and care to think about all facilities of the participants and speakers.
For this conference in Chennai, Sandeep Adithan and Navedha Sadhan are leading the efforts. For any questions, feel free to connect with her.

The Expectation

The conference provides a platform for interaction, networking, and learning for technical writers from all levels, with segments tailored to suit: 

• Technical Writers
  •  Technical writers who want to join or grow in the IT industry but are struggling and need guidance from the experts.
  • Technical writers who want to leverage the power of community bonding.
• Leaders 
  • Mid-level or senior managers who want to achieve more with their team members and want to identify gaps.
• Passionate about trends
  • Learn new trends that can help them as a technical writer.
  • Understand how technical writing has evolved over the years.
• Employers
  • Understand how to use Technical Documentation as a third pillar of building a product.
  • Understand the process of documentation. 
  • Hire skilled technical writers.

Session 1

The Session: Conversational Style – A New Approach to Documentation
One-to-one conversations break all expectations and give an informal tone to documentation. This new approach introduces conversational sentences that engage users’ interests and thereby provide a better user experience.
Transform your documentation to conversation style by making simple changes to it – Make it simpler, positive and intuitive.
The secret ingredient to conversational style is to use active voice and direct sentences. Using positive approach also helps build trust with customers.
Which sentence interests you:

Avoid past tense in documentation

or

Use present or present continuous tense in documentation.

The latter gives a positive note – you like it, right?
Let’s discuss more about the topic during the session.
The Speaker: Deepa Siddharthan
Current Role: Principal Technical Writer at Oracle
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ In her own words I have been working with Conversational Style Writing since 2020. After moving to this style, the transformed documentation has better clarity, simpler and active sentences. This style of writing makes the documentation better structured and concise.
I have created intuitive product documentation and training materials. I’m always interested in trying new methodologies and processes that simplify writer’s workload and save time. I have around nineteen plus years of experience in Technical Writing and Training Areas.
As an avid blogger, I’ve published a set of blogs using Word Press with topics about self development, time management and help documentation.
Follow me on LinkedIn _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Session 2 

The Session: Enhance content experience by gathering data
Join the session to know about various data sources available for writers and what they can do with the data to improve the user experience of product documentation.
Learn how writers can use data collected from Google Analytics, Search Console, Customer feedback, and Content consortium meetings. Let the presenters share some examples of how they used this data to derive meaningful inferences about documentation.
The Speakers: Syed Attaullah and Rohini Muralidharan
Speaker 1: Syed Attaullah Current Role: Information Architect, HCL Software
In his own words
18+ years of experience as a technical writer. I have set up Google Analytics and Search console for the product documentation and uses Looker Studio to visualize the data.
I maintain the two documentation portals delivered using two different technologies – MkDocs with Markdown and oXygen XML Webhelp with DITA.
Continually striving to understand the user’s perspective about the content and the documentation portal, I like to listen to various webinars and videos about the documentation trends and also keen to explore how collaboratively writers can work with all the content stakeholders. I have two kids who keep me busy in the house.
Follow me on LinkedIn
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Speaker 2: Rohini Muralidharan
Current Role: Content Design Manager with Autodesk
In her own words
My interest lies in exploring new documentation methods, processes, tools, and technologies to help users and to enhance their experience in their product usage journey. Currently, I am invested in learning and exploring API documentation and ways we can attain delightful API experiences. I like to adopt open source tools and technologies coupled with docs-as-code methodology for their flexibility, interoperability, and cost-effectiveness.
Follow me on LinkedIn _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Session 3 

The Session: Unravel the enigma of sizing effort for better execution

• Do you have challenges in measuring your team’s productivity?
• Do you often get ad hoc doc requests and have trouble in streamlining them?
• Do you want to ensure that your team is not burnt out and that the work is evenly distributed?
• Are you not sure if each team member has the capacity (in terms of hours) to pursue their professional goals (innovations, trainings, certifications, etc) outside of their project work?

This session will help you unfold these problems and will help you streamline the documentation effort for your team. The solution in this presentation is more data-driven that will help you in planning your staffing requirements and also present the required metrics to the leadership. This is a proven solution that will suit any organization, be it services-based or product-based, and it can be implemented across domains.
The Speaker: Uthra Chandrasekaran
Current Role: Lead Technical Writer, Cisco
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ In her own words
A certified Technical Communicator with extensive experience in – software and hardware documentation, setting-up doc processes, and mentoring writers. Interested in interfacing with customers to understand their requirements and translate that into end-user documents.
Follow me on LinkedIn _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Session 4 

The Session: Acquiring Skills for the Workplace
The purpose of this presentation is to analyse the appropriate skills and make suggestions on your technical skills. It is always a good idea to be aware of the most in-demand talents to stay current in the market and how to prepare for the evolving workplace given the uncertainty of the employment market.
It also draws attention to the neglected soft skills needed for the work as well as strategies for developing the proper mindset for accelerated learning. It covers useful advice to use as a guide and highlights the results each implicit soft skill is anticipated to produce.
The Speaker: Balaji Jayaraman
Current Role: Staff Technical Writer, Genesys
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
In his own words
I am a technical writer and a software developer working for Genesys IX, Chennai. I have 14+ years of experience in IT and worked in various phases of SDLC and DDLC. In my current role, I am responsible for authoring admin guides and API reference guides. I am interested in developing automation tools for documentation.
Follow me on LinkedIn _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Session 5

The Session: Implementing Mediawiki as a documentation platform
Are you interested in switching to a new documentation platform?
If so, join this session and learn how Genesys switched to a wiki-as-docs platform. We will see some of the challenges we faced and the lessons we learnt from it. We will also see how we pioneered newer innovations as part of this adoption.
Also learn how the IX team reinvented itself from being just a team of technical writers to a team that provides a better information experience to readers.
The Speaker: Xavier Roy
Current Role: Staff Technical Writer, Genesys
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ In his own words
I prefer to be a generalist in my approach to technical communication. Having played multiple roles over two decades in this field, I am interested in sharing what I know with others. Currently, I am interested in applications of personal knowledge management in work and life.
Follow me on LinkedIn
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Session 6

The Session: Writing for SEO
SEO writing is the process of writing content that search engines can easily understand. Also known as SEO copywriting or search engine optimization writing, SEO writing is done by adding search phrases or keywords in your content.
During the session, understand the crucial steps to be followed in SEO writing. Also, learn what SEO writing is and how a technical writer writing for SEO can ensure that the content they create can be used optimally for both search engines and users.
The Speaker: Sharmila Srinivasan
Current Role: Technical Documentation Manager, Navis
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ In her own words
I have about 16+ years of experience as a technical writer. As a Documentation Manager, I manage a team of writers for a Software product company in Chennai. I love crosswords, poetry, and cooking. My new found passion is team building and mentoring.
SEO was originally meant for websites but now companies use it to track and improve their product documentation that is available online. In my organization, we used SEO to see what our customers frequently search for in the Online Help. Based on this, we improve those topics to ensure that they get a better ranking and it also gives us the opportunity to rephrase topics with better/accurate keywords.
Follow me on LinkedIn
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Session 7 

The Session: Technical Documentation: How to Enter and Excel as an IC or Leader
Technical Documentation is a unique field. Skilled technical writers are lesser than what the market needs. The industry is seeking efficient technical documentation leaders who can not only help create a magical charm around the customer but also prove how technical writers are the the third pillar of a company.
The session is for you if you are one of these:
1. Freshers / others who want to enter Technical Documentation field.
2. Mid-level technical writers who are seeking answers for further growth.
3. Budding managers or leaders who want to establish doc team as a pillar of the company.
Join to learn how to enter the field or excel in the field. The interactive session will help you get answers to all your questions.
The Speakers: Punit Shrivastava
Current Role: Trainer and Mentor, TWT
In his own words
After 20+ years of experience in the field of writing that spreads across working for English daily, The Asian Age, and multiple software companies as an individual contributor and leader, I am making my best efforts to help the community. I hope that with these efforts the freshers and the working technical writing professionals won’t have to face the challenge that I faced during my journey as a technical writer.
I have trained 800+ students in the last one and half year and serve as mentors for as many as I could take at a given time. Feel free to connect if you need a chit chat related to technical documentation or sports or any other topic that suits or troubles you.
Follow me on LinkedIn