Portland 2024 Recap - Talk Videos, Photos, Sketchnotes, CoC Report

2024-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

Hey everyone,

Our team is slowly emerging from the post-conference recovery period, and we wanted to send out a quick message to thank everyone for helping to make our conference such a success. We appreciate everyone who makes the conference possible: speakers, sponsors, organizers, volunteers, and attendees alike!

It was great to see everyone back at Revolution Hall in Portland, and to fill our new venue with wonderful documentarians once again.

Conference recap

At just under 350 attendees this conference was another success. We had the usual mix of talks on the main stage along with Q&A, lightning talks, unconference sessions, writing sprints, social event, and sponsor expo.

We used more spaces in the venue this year, and it really felt like the overall flow of the conference was smoother.

Talk videos

Videos of the talks are now available on YouTube. This includes all conference talks with Q&A, as well as the lightning talks. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss any talks from our other conferences.

Thanks again to all our presenters, emcees, and folks who asked wonderful questions!

Conference photos

We have photos from the event available in our Portland 2024 photo album, thanks to our wonderful photographer Kay! We really love the photos each year, and you’re welcome to use them for non-commercial purposes, such as conference write ups, as per our Creative Commons License.

Talk sketchnotes

We also have sketchnotes for each of our talks, which are being uploaded as they are colored. Check out our Portland 2024 sketchnotes album on Flickr to see the visual summaries of the talks and sessions. Thanks to our sketchnoter, Dennis Dawson, for capturing the essence of the conference in such a unique way, while also presenting the first conference talk on Monday, his first full length talk at Write the Docs!

Code of Conduct transparency report

As with any Write the Docs event, this conference was covered by our community Code of Conduct. We aim to be as transparent with CoC incidents and enforcement as we can.

To ensure that our CoC was visible and accessible, we took a number of specific steps:

Every participant agreed to the Code of Conduct in advance during registration.
The CoC, or a summary, was included on the conference website and around the venue.
The CoC was repeatedly mentioned in our conference introduction and announcements.
We specifically stressed that the CoC applies to all conference spaces including the social event.
We encouraged all attendees to report any incident, even if they were not sure whether it was a violation.

We had 2 reports of CoC incidents at the conference:

An attendee reported an incident where someone shouted a comment during a talk about documentation tools that was not appropriate. We were unable to identify the person at the conference, but staff apologized to the speaker, and noted during on-stage announcements and social media that this behavior was not acceptable.
A staff member reported that an attendee was acting in an aggressive manner to staff about a conference selection process. This was addressed by the staff member with the attendee, and no further action was taken, other than the staff member noting the incident as a Code of Conduct report.

Attendees can always report incidents, even after the conference, by emailing us at conduct@writethedocs.org.

Come to our Atlantic or Australia conferences

Don’t forget our Atlantic virtual conference in September, and our Australia in-person conference later in the year. The CFP is open for Atlantic, and dates will be announced soon for Australia.

We’re also looking for more sponsors to make our events just as magical as this year’s event. You can see our prospectus for Atlantic. Get in touch if you have any questions.

Thanks again

Thanks so much to the following companies for supporting the Portland conference this year:

GitBook

ReadMe

MongoDB

JetBrains

Zoomin

NGINX

Redocly

Netlify

Google Open Source

Read the Docs

We’re so grateful to our sponsors, speakers, volunteers, and attendees for making this conference possible. Whether you were able to come out this time or not, we hope to see you again next year - or even sooner at one of our other events!

Blog - Posts tagged portland-2024