Trading in Trust: How Documentation Protects People, Not Just Projects - Stephan Rayner

Speaker: Stephan Rayner Documentation isn't simply a reference artifact, it's trust infrastructure. Its job isn't only to inform, but also to create and preserve the conditions under which people can work together honestly. Without it, power fills the vacuum, and the loudest voice wins. This talk tells two stories from opposite ends of the same dynamic: As head of data at a toxic and now defunct mobile games company, my junior analysts were regularly pressured into handing over data to stakeholders who then misused it. I'm the arrogant Senior Machine Learning Engineer who lost an argument to a well-written expense policy. Both stories reveal the same mechanism: good documentation externalizes authority, leveling a playing field decided by power, clout, or seniority, and doing it without so many difficult conversations. You'll leave with a practical framework for writing docs that do this work: Write for the enforcer, not just the reader: think about who has to hold the line when someone pushes back Document the why alongside the what: rules without reasoning invite argument Anchor to mission rather than procedure: clear purpose lets people reason from it themselves, rather than needing every edge case spelled out Make your limitations visible: a doc that names what it doesn't cover builds more trust than one that oversells Recorded at Write the Docs Berlin 2026: https://www.writethedocs.org/conf/ber...