Open Help 2011 - Cincinnati

We live in strange times. I woke up on Saturday morning to find that I'd been magically transported to Cincinnati by a benevolent spirit. And American Airlines. Bleary-eyed and somewhat confused, I was accosted by a passing documentation team and forced into attending the inaugural Open Help conference, where a gaggle of tech writing luminaries pummelled me with their insight. Only hours later, I was being exposed to questionable meat products by the Godzilla fan club. Standard.

The conference went pretty well. There were some good talks on user-centred information design and converting technical support queries into valuable documentation, lots of interesting documentation technology from Red Hat and Mozilla and tips on designing certification programmes from BSD. This was followed-up on Sunday by a day of discussion, where we shared experience and converted one of the speakers to Ubuntu. Open source FTW. Now we're up to the GNOME hackfest which, unfortunately, has been marred by the availability of peanut M&M's. I'm spending the rest of the afternoon converting my sugar high into a bunch of commits. More on the conference later, and hopefully Shaun will have videos from the talks.