The first ever (that we know of) conference for documentation writers in open source conference started today in Owen Sound, Ontario (about 2 hours from Toronto). The Writing Open Source conference is being hosted by Emma Jane Hogbin, and a few of us from GNOME are here:

(Left to Right: Shaun McCance, Milo Cassagrande, Phil Bull and myself).

We’re halfway through the first day, which is keynotes, and the conference is awesome.

Some random thoughts:

• How cool is it that all of our keynote speakers are women? And our conference overall is 50% women / 50% men.
• Lots of different projects are represented, including BSD, Drupal, GNOME, XFCE and more.
• The keynotes are great. All of us have pages of notes, either on paper, in Tomboy or insert your favorite text editor.
• A quarter of attendees have netbooks. There’s a couple of Macs, and the rest of us are on laptops with Linux. I haven’t seen one Windows laptop yet.
• Experience ranges from published authors to one individual who’s never contributed but wants to learn.

Belinda from Canonical is talking now, and she has goodies and exercises for us to do, so I have to run. More to come. You can follow along on Twitter or identi.ca with the #woscon09 hash tag too.