At the recent GSoC Mentor Summit, the Google Season of Docs (GSoD) program was announced, with the idea of giving open source projects more opportunities to engage with technical writers, and vice versa.
It’s still in the early stages of development, but could be a great opportunity for OpenMRS and distributions such as Bahmni. I’ve submitted feedback expressing the community’s interest in participating. Are there any ideas for work that could benefit from technical writing? This might be a specific project, module or something more general like updating the existing OpenMRS guides.
An outline of the aim of GSoD:
GSoD is similar to Google Summer of Code but focuses on docs and technical writers, rather than on code and students. The target participants are experienced tech writers who can work with you on your docs. The writing part of GSoD will run for 3 months, similar to GSoC. Another difference is that the technical writers will not be earning stipends, they will be doing this to learn more about open source code and working on developer focused docs with code and building their resume. And the writers will often have other jobs, this would be a side project for them (not something they will be focusing on for 30 hours a week - in most cases).
We think GSoD will bring benefits for both parties:
Open source projects gain documentation mentors embedded into their community.
Tech writers gain mentorship in OSS and in developer products.
I actually like the stipends allocated for this program by Google. we probably need to think about getting into this asap considering their tight timeline at:
Sure this is something we need to give attention so soon given the fact that they have a few slots for Organisations. We could look out for about 3 projects since the maximum for each organization is 2 projects.
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