Nobody in your office does what you do: The case for technical communication communities (Part 1)

Co-published with ASTC & TechCommNZ

In Part 1 (this post), I talk about what professional communities mean to me, and how they have shaped my career. My post here is merely how an outsider would look at them, and any assumptions about the organisations are my own.

In Part 2 of this conversation, we will hear from ASTC and TechCommNZ representatives on how these issues are affecting them from the inside and how they are countering this.

It was during one of the lectures at Swinburne University mid 2000s, where I was completing my Graduate Diploma in Technical Communications, that a lecturer reckoned it might be a good idea for me to meet “other people like us.” That phrasing stuck with me.

Because for most technical writers, the search for other people like us is ongoing, quietly urgent, and not easily satisfied inside any single workplace.

Before I ever walked into an ASTC meeting though, there was austechwriter, an email mailing list started by Geoffrey Marnell, that served as the unofficial town square for Australian technical writers through much of the 2000s and 2010s.

If you were a technical writer in Australia during that era and you felt professionally isolated, austechwriter was often the first place you discovered that you weren’t alone. Questions about tools, rates, difficult stakeholders, career pivots, all of it played out in that shared inbox, in threads that could run for days and generate more genuine insight than any formal professional development session I’d attended. It was scrappy, occasionally chaotic, and yet, indispensable.

For practitioners outside the major cities especially, the mailing list was a lifeline. When you were the only technical writer in a regional office, or in your entire industry domain, the list gave you access to a professional community that geography otherwise denied you. The debates that played out there about content strategy, single-sourcing, the creeping encroachment of “content writer” job titles into technical writing territory, the documentation tool rants, those conversations shaped how a generation of Australian practitioners thought about, and deeply cared about the profession.

austechwriter has since been retired (mid-2025), and it deserved a proper send-off. It had a good run. It did exactly what it was designed to do, at exactly the moment the profession needed it. And in retrospect, it was ahead of its time, a precursor to the Slack workspaces and meetup groups that now serve the same function for a new generation of practitioners. The medium has changed; the underlying need it answered has not.

I was a noob when I walked into my first ASTC Victoria meeting. What I remember most isn’t the agenda or the speaker, it’s the feeling in the room. These were people who argued about comma placement with genuine passion, who had strong opinions about single-sourcing, and who understood, without needing it explained, why the sentence “refer to the above” is an abomination in any document that might ever be printed or published online.

Technical writing is, paradoxically, a profession defined by communication that is often invisible to the people who practice it alone. You sit in an engineering team, or a product team, or more often than not, if you are in Australia, in a grand team of one. You produce work that people notice only when it’s wrong. And you rarely have a colleague nearby who has faced the same problems, made the same calls, or carries the same quiet pride in a well-structured help system, or a documentation site that has an envious information architecture.

A community doesn’t fix that structural solitude overnight, and your employer’s org chart often stays the same after every conference. But a community changes how you experience it. It provides the peer learning your workplace sometimes can’t, the career perspective your manager may sometimes not have, and something harder to name but just as important: the sense that what you do is a real discipline, with standards and history, and people who care about its future.

Over more than two decades, I’ve watched technical communication communities do extraordinary things for individual careers, mine included. I’ve also watched them struggle, adapt, nearly collapse, and reinvent themselves. What follows is part personal account, part professional argument for why local communities like ASTC, TechCommNZ, and Write the Docs Australia, are worth showing up for, and worth fighting to sustain.

Niche professions need a community (more than ever)

There’s a question worth contemplating before we go further: why does a professional association matter in an era of infinite online connection? LinkedIn exists. Slack communities ping notifications hourly. So what do local organisations like ASTC, TechCommNZ, with its committee meetings, its membership fees, or Write the Docs Australia with its annual conference and meetups, offer that a well-curated Discord can’t?

The honest answer starts with the specific character of technical writing as a profession. Unlike software development or product management, or many other software roles, technical writing rarely has critical mass inside a single organisation. A company might employ two hundred software engineers and one technical writer. That writer’s manager might be a senior engineer, or a communications director, or an engineering manager who inherited the role, someone who almost certainly has never written a software manual, and who therefore cannot mentor you in the craft, challenge your standards, or tell you whether what you’re producing is genuinely good or merely adequate.

I must digress here by saying that I have been extremely lucky in 90% of my roles to have worked with some brilliant managers who had an amazing understanding of this craft, and their feedback was equal parts constructive and forward-looking. Not everyone I have spoken to in our communities may be that lucky unfortunately.

“Community is where the profession thinks out loud. If you’re not in the room, you’re not part of the conversation that shapes what this job becomes.”

This is the first and most important function of a professional community: it gives you peers when your workplace can’t. Not connections. Not followers. Peers: people who have navigated the same decisions, who can tell you whether your instinct about a content architecture is sound, who will push back when you’re wrong and recognise when you’re right. That kind of feedback is irreplaceable, and for most technical writers, it may only exist outside their organisation.

The second function is advocacy. Technical writing is chronically misunderstood by the industries it serves. Hiring managers confuse it with journalism. Executives treat documentation as an afterthought. Salary benchmarks are set by people who don’t understand the skill set. No individual practitioner can shift those norms alone, but a professional body can publish research, make enough noise at industry events, push back against job ads that conflate technical writing with data entry, and over time move the needle on how the profession is perceived and compensated.

The third function, and the one most underestimated by newcomers (and some veterans too!) is professional formation. The version of you that has served on a committee, presented at a conference, run a workshop for junior practitioners, or even just argued a point at a members’ forum is measurably more capable than the version that stayed home. These experiences build skills that not all employers may never think to give you.

ASTC: From state branches to a national body

The Australian Society for Technical Communication has a history that mirrors the evolution of the profession itself. For years, ASTC operated as a collection of state branches, primarily Victoria and New South Wales, each with its own committee, its own events calendar, and its own personality. ASTC Victoria, where I first found my footing, had the slightly fierce energy of a community that knew it was small and had decided to make that an advantage: the events were intimate, the debates were real, and the people kept showing up because they genuinely believed in promoting the profession.

The merger that eventually brought those branches together into a single national body was both inevitable and bittersweet. Inevitable because small volunteer organisations running in parallel are inefficient and fragile, and if the wrong two or three people step back in the same year, a branch can effectively cease to function. Bittersweet because local identity carries real warmth that national structures can dilute. There are ASTC Victoria members from that era who will tell you, with complete sincerity, that something was lost when the geography dissolved.

On volunteering: I served on the ASTC Victoria committee for two years, and I’ll openly admit: it gave me more than I gave it. Managing the website updates. Running agenda items. Managing competing views from strong-willed professionals. Finding consensus in a volunteer group with varied opinions. These are real leadership skills, and I practised them in a low-stakes environment before I needed them in high-stakes ones. This is what committee service does that most professional development courses don’t: it gives you the actual experience, not the framework. If you’re considering putting your hand up for a committee role, consider this your nudge.

What the national body gained is equally real. A single point of representation. A coordinated national conference. The ability to speak to industry and government with one voice rather than two slightly different ones. ASTC today runs events, workshops, and an annual gathering that brings practitioners from across the country into the same room, which matters enormously in a country where the profession is thinly spread across an enormous geography.

Volunteer-run associations operate under permanent resource constraint, and ASTC is no exception. But the community it sustains, the conversations at the margins of events, the friendships that outlast job titles, the professional norms it quietly reinforces is genuinely irreplaceable. I would not be the practitioner I am without it.

TechCommNZ: A different kind of intimacy

I first attended a TechCommNZ conference in 2015 with the slightly tentative energy of someone turning up to someone else’s family reunion. I knew people would be welcoming, but I didn’t know where I’d fit. By the end of the first day, that question had dissolved entirely.

TechCommNZ conferences have a quality that’s difficult to manufacture and easy to destroy: they are small enough that everyone is genuinely present to everyone else. There’s no sprawling expo hall to hide in, no parallel track you disappear into for the whole afternoon. The community’s scale, a true reflection of New Zealand’s population and the profession’s niche within it, creates an enforced intimacy that turns out to be its greatest asset.

On presenting and volunteering: I’ve presented at TechCommNZ four times and volunteered twice. Presenting there taught me things about my own thinking that years of writing had not. When you have to distil your practice into forty-five minutes for an audience of peers, people who will know immediately if you’re hand-waving or cutting corners, you discover which of your ideas are solid and which are comfortable habits you’ve never examined. That’s a particular gift that only a community with high standards can give you.

There is also something to be said for the trans-Tasman relationship itself. Australian and New Zealand technical writers operate in slightly different markets, different hiring norms, different industry mixes, different regulatory environments but face many of the same structural challenges: small professional communities, employers who undervalue documentation, the ongoing negotiation over what technical writing actually is. Attending TechCommNZ has consistently shown me things my Australian context had made invisible, and I suspect the reverse is also true for New Zealand practitioners who engage with ASTC.

Write the Docs: A global perspective

Write the Docs occupies a different register to ASTC and TechCommNZ. It emerged from the developer documentation world, it’s digitally native by design, and it operates at a scale that would be impossible for any regional body to match. Its Slack community has practitioners from dozens of countries active at any given moment, which means that when you post a question at 10pm on a Tuesday in Melbourne, someone in Amsterdam or San Francisco will have encountered the exact problem you’re describing, and would often respond by the time you hit the snooze alarm on your mobile next morning.

What WTD offers that regional associations can’t is access to diversity of context. If you only engage with Australian technical writers, you develop a professional worldview shaped by Australian industry norms, which is real and valuable, but incomplete. Understanding how documentation teams operate in large US tech companies, or how European regulatory requirements shape information architecture, or what the documentation profession looks like in markets where it’s growing rapidly, makes you a better practitioner and a more resilient one.

This is exactly what encouraged me to bring the global Write the Docs idea to the land Down Under. Around that mid-2010s, I was increasingly seeing a good number of remote roles being advertised and while strongly US-based, these organisations were happy to hire folks based elsewhere, especially Australia and New Zealand. It was a good time as any to bring some of that global context and sharing to Australia.

How these communities have actually helped me

Abstract arguments for professional community are easy to make and easy to ignore. So let me be specific.

A job I took in 2012, came via a conversation at an ASTC event. Not a formal job board posting, not a recruiter cold-message, a conversation in a corridor with someone who had heard I was looking for a new challenge and knew of a role that hadn’t been advertised yet. That is the oldest and most durable mechanism of professional community, and it works precisely because the relationship preceded the transaction.

AI may be everywhere currently, but an earlier insight into what was back then a very peculiar tech – IBM Watson, came from a TechCommNZ conference session in 2015 by a practitioner I’d never have encountered otherwise. Ideas travel through communities in ways they simply don’t travel through job descriptions or LinkedIn posts.

All these years of helping out with Write the Docs in Australia has given me the practical experience of running a professional organisation under constraint, managing volunteers, balancing competing priorities, making decisions with incomplete information. These skills show up, visibly, in subsequent roles. They were not on my CV, but they were in the room with me every time I had to lead something complicated. At my current workplace, over the last 2 years, my Manager has asked me to lead the content process for a 250+ internal annual conference, because he knew I had this experience doing it within technical writing communities.

What communities are up against

It would be dishonest to write a piece like this without acknowledging the headwinds. Professional associations everywhere are navigating a difficult decade, and technical communication communities are not exempt. We saw STC in US close doors last year after going through years of declining membership, but also perhaps a touch of losing track of relevance with current industry themes.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the work itself in ways that are still unresolved. The question of what technical writers do when AI can produce a serviceable first draft in seconds is real and urgent, and the profession hasn’t yet settled on an answer. That uncertainty affects communities too: membership hesitates when the future of the profession is unclear, and communities struggle to provide professional development for a role whose scope is shifting mid-conversation.

Volunteering is harder than it used to be. The pandemic-era burnout that swept through the workforce didn’t spare volunteers, and it’s still working its way through the system. Many practitioners who might have joined a committee five years ago are now running close to their limit just managing the day job. Communities that depend entirely on volunteer energy are operating with diminished reserves.

And there is genuine competition for the kind of connection that professional associations once had more or less to themselves. A practitioner in 2026 can find an online channel, a technical writing subreddit, a LinkedIn community, and three different Discord servers before they’ve finished their morning coffee. The case for formal membership, with its fees and its governance and its annual general meetings has to be made more explicitly than it once did.

This is worth sitting with, because it’s not a new problem. It’s a recurring one. austechwriter filled exactly this role for Australian practitioners in the 2000s: low-friction, always-on, available to anyone with an email address. When the platforms it competed with became richer and faster, the mailing list format faded, and maybe the enthusiasm with the email format overall. That’s not a failure, it’s the natural lifecycle of a community tool that served its moment well. The lesson isn’t that austechwriter should have resisted change. It’s that every generation of practitioners finds its own platforms, and the question for formal associations is always the same: what do you offer that the platform of the moment cannot?

None of these challenges are fatal. But they require communities to be more intentional about what they offer, more creative about how they structure participation, and more honest about the limits of models that haven’t changed significantly since the early 2000s. The communities that will matter in 2030 are the ones willing to have that conversation now.

Show up, turn up, participate

If you are early (or actually anywhere) in your technical writing career in Australia or New Zealand, you may be reading this and thinking: I already have LinkedIn, I already have AI agents at my disposal, I already have more feeds and channels than I can keep up with. Why does ASTC, TechCommNZ or Write the Docs deserve a chunk of my limited time and attention?

Here is the most honest answer I can give you: because community is where the profession thinks out loud, and if you’re not in the room, you’re not part of the conversation that shapes what this job becomes. The norms that govern how technical writers are hired, how they’re compensated, how their role is defined in relation to AI and UX and content strategy, those norms are being negotiated right now, in exactly the kinds of forums and committees and conference hallways that professional associations make possible.

Showing up is not passive. Going to events, joining the committee, volunteering at a conference, putting your hand up to present something you’re still figuring out, these are acts of professional formation that compound over time in ways that are genuinely difficult to replicate elsewhere. The version of you that has done those things is more capable, more connected, and more resilient than the version that watched from the outside.

There are no perfect organisations. No volunteer-run body is. But they are ours, and they are worth showing up for.