Connecting Permaculture And Documentation With Liz Argall The Not-Boring Tech Writer podcast

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Connecting permaculture and documentation with Liz Argall

1d ago 45:52

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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
Introduction to search term analysis: Liz’s blog post about the Lightning Talk she gave, which includes links and instructions for her spreadsheet
Liz's portfolio site: https://lizargall.github.io/
Diataxis workflow: https://diataxis.fr/how-to-use-diataxis/
Ubuntu Summit 2024 | Open source software between Africa and the West: The YouTube presentation that inspired Liz to get in touch with Vince
Lucy Mitchell's website: https://www.ioreka.dev/
https://lizargall.github.io/blog/process: A blog post by Liz where she alks about permaculture and Diataxis in the context of technical writing

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Liz's website: includes her blog, which has several awesome spreadsheet matrices you can copy and use for yourself
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Transcript

Kate 0:04

Welcome to The Not-Boring Tech Writer, a podcast sponsored by KnowledgeOwl. Together, we explore topics and hear from other writers to help inspire us, deepen our skills, and foster our distinctly not-boring tech writing community. Hello, my lovely, not-boring tech writers. This month, we kind of have a little change up. Normally, this would be a solo episode, but in a nod to Write the Docs as well as some personal stuff I have going on, we decided we'd do a bonus interview episode instead of a solo episode, and maybe I'll be really productive before the next solo episode, so you won't know how unproductive I've been in the last month. So with that in mind, welcome to another interview episode. This month's guest is definitely a Write the Docs special. I had never met her before Write the Docs. And lo and behold, we ended up giving a lightning talk in the same lightning talk session, and that led to us kind of connecting socially during the event, which is a very Write the Docs thing, and as a result, she's here on the pod, because I think she's an amazing human being, and she's had a really interesting array of work experience, and we have a shared love for spreadsheets and matrices. So without further ado, I would like to welcome you to the pod, Liz Argall. Liz, welcome to the show.

Liz 1:22

Thank you so much for having me. And I should say, as we discussed before, I'm a big permaculture fan as well. And you know, you gotta follow the seasons, and having a little bit of fallow resting the soil is not unproductive. It's listening to your body and building capacity for other kinds of productivity.

Kate 1:40

So Liz, can you tell me a bit about your tech writer villain origin story? How did you end up getting into this field in the first place?

Liz 1:50

When I was seven years old, there were some contractors working on our house, an extension on our house, and I was fascinated with them. And my dad noticed that I was fascinated, and he said, “You should go interview them and write about it,” because that's the sort of dad I had. In my little notebook I interviewed them about, you know, putting in flooring and stuff like that, and what it was like. And I wrote it down. And because I went and wrote it down, you know, then suddenly we had more of a relationship. I...

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