Season of Docs is Google’s annual program that fosters collaboration between open source projects and technical writers. It’s happening for the first time in 2019!
Season of Docs is a unique program that pairs technical writers with open source mentors to introduce the technical writer to an open source community and provide guidance while the writer works on a real world open source project. The technical writer in turn provides documentation expertise to the open source organization.
Projects can cover a wide range of fields including Cloud computing, operating systems, graphics, medicine, programming languages, robotics, science, security and many more. Season of Docs is not a recruiting program or an internship but it does provide an invaluable experience and looks great on a resume!
How To Participate?
From April 30, 2019 you can see the list of participating open source organizations on the Season of Docs website at g.co/seasonofdocs. The application period for technical writers opens on May 29, 2019 and ends on June 28, 2019.
This year’s Season of Docs is a pilot that accepts only a limited number of applications, so don’t wait to the last minute to prepare!
Have questions? Email season-of-docs-support@googlegroups.com or reach out to one of the mentors listed below on https://community.mattermost.com/
Mattermost Project Ideas:
Mattermost Documentation Information Architecture
Mentors: Jason Blais (@jason.blais), Eric Sethna (@eric), Katie Wiersgalla (@katie.wiersgalla)
Mattermost’s key principle is Customer Obsession - we exist to make customers successful. A key resource for customers’ success with our product is our extensive documentation. This exciting opportunity will involve improving the user experience of https://docs.mattermost.com for end-users, as well as admins who deploy and maintain the Mattermost system.
Resources: https://github.com/mattermost/docs
Integration Best Practices
Mentor: Jason Blais (@jason.blais), Eric Sethna (@eric), Katie Wiersgalla (@katie.wiersgalla)
Mattermost is on a mission to build a large and comprehensive integrations catalogue at https://integrations.mattermost.com! Work with the integration’s R&D team to define best practices for building integrations. Improve and expand on existing documentation https://developers.mattermost.com/integrate/getting-started/ with key topics, including user experience design, common do’s & don’ts when building, development set-ups and how-to guides.
Resources: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-developer-documentation/tree/master/site/content/integrate
Review and Refine In-Product Text
Mentors: Eric Sethna (@Eric), Jason Blais (@jason.blais), Katie Wiersgalla (@katie.wiersgalla)
In-product help text, instruction and guidance is a key for ensuring successful use of features. Join us on our community server https://community.mattermost.com to experience Mattermost and explore where we can improve our in-product text to be concise, useful and meet our goal of designing obvious, fast and forgiving experiences for global users.
Resources: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server
Developer Contributor Journey
Mentors: Jason Blais (@jason.blais), Joram Wilander (@joram)
As you begin your exploration into open source contributions, examine the journey through the eyes of our developer contributor audience (https://developers.mattermost.com/contribute/getting-started/). Help us improve our getting started information and work with our development team to add crucial information to the specific technology sections so that developers are armed with knowledge on how existing systems work when they begin coding.
Resources: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-developer-documentation/tree/master/site/content/contribute
Product Planning Templates and Communication Tools
Mentors: Katie Wiersgalla (@katie.wiersgalla), Jason Blais (@jason.blais), Eric Sethna (@eric)
Transparency and community input through the R&D process starts with engagement in the planning and design process. Work with Mattermost’s product managers, internal stakeholders and customers to refine the process and information shared through the planning, specification and design lifecycle. Materials include specification documentation, research materials, product roadmaps and connecting all the materials by updating the process overview. You can view the current spec materials in action at https://community.mattermost.com/core/channels/spec-reviews.
Resources: https://github.com/mattermost/docs/blob/master/source/process/design-process.rst
Mattermost Product Recipes
Mentors: Katie Wiersgalla (@katie.wiersgalla), Jason Blais (@jason.blais), Eric Sethna (@eric)
Mattermost’s vision is to make the world safer and more productive. We want to empower our customers with a “cookbook” of recipes which help them configure their systems and integrate their workflows to accomplish their specific goals. Check out an example located on our blog: https://mattermost.com/blog/mattermost-recipe-how-to-create-a-chatbot-with-dialogflow-and-google-cloud-functions/. Review features, use cases and chat with our customers and customer success teams to document how customers can use Mattermost to fulfill this mission for themselves.
Resources: https://docs.mattermost.com/process/guest-article.html#mattermost-recipes