Connecting permaculture and documentation with Liz Argall

The Not-Boring Tech Writer

In this episode, I’m talking with Liz Argall, a writer I connected with at Write the Docs Portland 2025. We talk about working on open source projects, developing good qualitative metrics, her work with a permaculture nonprofit in Uganda, and the ways that being interviewed by a technical writer can make hidden expertise shine.

Liz and I presented in the same Lightning Talk session at Write the Docs Portland 2025 and subsequently discovered a shared love for spreadsheet tools, qualitative metrics, and permaculture. We discuss her work on Project Aria, a combination of hardware, software, and data collection geared toward solving the problems that augmented reality will need to address. Liz stresses the point of writing for poorly informed and/or sleep-deprived audiences. We also discuss the importance of qualitative metrics and some of Liz’s favorite qualitative metrics that help capture the story of the documentation, including impact and saving engineers’ and SMEs’ time.

Liz also tells us about her involvement with Ngombor Community Development Alliance, a non-profit focusing on permaculture development in the West Nile region of Uganda. We also discuss how sometimes just showing up for something–including showing up to work on your docs–has far more impact than we realize.

About Liz Argall:

Liz Argall creates empowering documentation and processes; where you need it, when you need it.

She’s a technical writer, program manager, author, and trainer who delivers humanizing, data informed, accessible, and technically complex projects for a range of organizations, from Fortune 500 companies to a community development organization in Uganda.

In a past life, she was a professional artist talent scout and she’s still a professional member of SFWA (now called the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association). She’s a graduate of Clarion Writers Workshop, has been critiqued by multiple New York Times best selling authors, and has critiqued the stories of multiple award winning authors, which is a long way of saying that she likes to give a good portfolio critique!

Resources discussed in this episode:

• Project Aria
• Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti’s Why I became a Documentation Engineer (and what that even means): The source for the phrase “technical therapist”
• Write the Docs Portland 2025, Lightning Talk session 1
• Liz's portfolio site
• Introduction to search term analysis: Liz’s blog post about the Lightning Talk she gave, which includes links and instructions for her spreadsheet
• Attend to the work: A blog post by Liz where she alks about permaculture and Diataxis in the context of technical writing
• Diátaxis as a guide to work
• Lucy Mitchell's website
• Ubuntu Summit 2024 | Open source software between Africa and the West: The YouTube presentation that inspired Liz to get in touch with Vince
• Ngombor Community Development Alliance: a non-profit focusing on permaculture development in the West Nile region of Uganda
• Ngombor Community Development Alliance's sponsor a tree (or chicken) page

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