Google Season of Docs
What is Google Season of Docs (GSoD)?
GSoD 2019 is a pilot effort by Google to allow technical writers to work with open source organisations and allow them to learn about open source code. See FAQs
At Systers, our goal is to have projects that impact users/communities by improving their duties/tasks with technology. This is hard to accomplish if we don't have a good set of documentation/getting started material. We have been participating in Google Summer of Code since 2009! We participate in Google Code In and in 2017, we had three interns for Outreachy. On top of that, we have wonderful folks who drop by and contribute to Systers projects when they’ve got some downtime from their jobs. That is a lot of traffic from a very diverse group of people with experience ranging from beginners to experts from around the globe.
We had an intern work with us on streamlining Systers documentation and processes in Outreachy but we have a long way to go :)
These are some of the ideas we have to get you started, feel free to reach out to us for more clarity/proposing your own!
- Build documentation sites with GitHub pages for each of the active repositories and publish an initial set of basic documents on the site. Some examples are here and here.
Overall we would expect a GH pages site to have some version of the following
- Getting started
- Installation
- Contributing/Rules for contributing [Include non-coding contributions]
- Tutorial
- Support or contact
- Refactor the open source documentation for each active project to have a documentation folder. Some template options are available here
We'd expect the documentation to be in similar form as shown below:
Some of the things this would include are outlining project requirements with the same template (consistent formatting such as .md file and remove heavy .pdf files) and updating all the repos with a .github folder that includes templates.
- Create a set of how-to guides for onboarding to Systers OSS Community. We already have a contributing guide which outlines rules around PR and issue creation but that doesn't help people who are new to open source. For this project, we expect proposals around videos for onboarding, interactive tutorials or anything that helps land the message better :)
- You can join our slack channel and introduce yourself in #intro. For questions around GSoD, feel free to drop in any of the community open sessions which happens every week or post about in #questions.
- Remember that this is an inclusive community, committed to creating a safe, positive environment. See the full Code of Conduct.