Docs

Status: Active
Bottom liner: Chris Chinchilla
How to get involved: Get in touch with Chris

Purpose

To inform and assist with best practices for documentation in open source projects, and also help fund documentation related tooling projects.

We are aware that there are many other projects and individuals working on tools and resources to suit the needs we identified. Instead of creating more resources, from now on we instead intend to identify existing projects filling these needs that need support or help and help them with contributions, promotion, or more. We also intend to run a quarterly check in and run regular office hours for projects who want to ask questions.

Goals

• To connect those who contribute to documentation. To each other, and to projects that need help and advice.
• To maintain a page of these resources and people.

Guiding questions

• What is documentation?
• Who writes documentation?

Reports and documents

• Notes from the Sustain Brussels 2020 meeting.

We are

A group of people interested in creating and maintaining good quality open source documentation. This includes everything from contributors guides to end user documentation and best practices for all of these.

People involved

The Sustain OSS Working Group includes members of the in-person sessions at the annual Sustain OSS Summit. Since the February 2020 Summit, the Working Group moved online and welcomed new participants.

Currently, the following fine folks are a part of the conversations about documentation and sustainability:

• Chris Ward (Chronosphere / Open source projects) - bottom liner
• Erin McKean (Google)
• Eriol Fox (Open Source Design, Open Food Network)
• Javier Cánovas (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)
• Justin W. Flory (UNICEF Innovation, Rochester Institute of Technology)
• Richard Littauer (Maintainer Mountaineer)

Suggestions welcome

Questions? We want to hear from you?

We are aware that there are many other projects and individuals working on tools and resources to suit the needs we identified. Instead of creating more resources, the working group intends to identify existing projects filling these needs that need support or help and help them with contributions, promotion, or more.

We run a quarterly check in and run regular office hours for projects who want to ask questions.

Office hours

If you would like to book a time to talk in more detail about your documentation needs, then you can also sign up for an office hours session where we are happy to help.

Sign up for a session.

Get in touch

Go to #documentation on the Slack channel, or speak with Pia Mancini or Chris Chinchilla. You can also post questions in our discourse thread.

Resources

• For general information about technical documentation and a very active and encouraging community, check out Write the Docs.
• Templates for open source documentation are being created by The Good Docs Project. (This is a new project, and not all types of documentation have templates. Contributions welcome!)
• For a huge (but somewhat uncurated) list of tools for open source documentation, check out https://awesomeopensource.com/projects/documentation.