Season of Docs - Fostering open source collaboration with technical writers

Community
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Hi all,

Season of Docs

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Google announced a new program called “Season of Docs” - Fostering open source collaboration with technical writers.

The goals of Season of Docs are to give technical writers an opportunity to gain experience in contributing to open source projects, and to give open source projects an opportunity to engage the technical writing community.

During the program, technical writers spend a few months working closely with an open source community. They bring their technical writing expertise to the project’s documentation, and at the same time learn about open source and new technologies.

The open source projects work with the technical writers to improve the project’s documentation and processes. Together they may choose to build a new documentation set, or redesign the existing docs, or improve and document the open source community’s contribution procedures and onboarding experience.

Together, we raise public awareness of open source docs, of technical writing, and of how we can work together to the benefit of the global open source community.

For more information: Introduction  |  Season of Docs  |  Google Developers

Example Project Ideas: Project ideas  |  Season of Docs  |  Google Developers

Timeline

  • Program announcement : March 11, 2019
  • Organization applications : April 2, 2019 at 20:00 UTC
  • Organizations announced : April 30, 2019 at 12:00 UTC
  • Technical writer applications : May 29, 2019 at 18:00 UTC
  • Technical writing projects announced : July 30, 2019 at 18:00 UTC
  • Doc development : September 2, 2019
  • Project finalization and evaluation : November 25 - 29, 2019 at 18:00 UTC

Since we participate in Google Summer of Code, and Google Code-in usually, it would be another opportunity for OpenMRS to improve the technical writing and documentation inside the community. So please be aware of the timeline, and let’s plan to apply for “Season of Docs” also :slight_smile:

Cc: @burke @dkayiwa @c.antwi @jennifer @jwnasambu @irenyak1

Thanks.

4 Likes
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thanks for this @suthagar23 it will greatly contribute to improving the community documentation :+1:

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@suthagar23 This is a wonderful opportunity which we can discuss in our Documentation Forum meeting scheduled this afternoon at 1pm UTC

How do I get involved in preparing the proposal?

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We need to assign one potential community mentor as Admin for the program, and need to prepare a proposal like GSoC. I didn’t go through it detail to get more information, so better to assign some one to take lead on this :smiley:

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@suthagar23 i will work with the lead person on this

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@suthagar23, thanks for sharing this - it’s a great idea! It looks like it’s a little bit different from GSoC in that there will be a technical writer working with our organization admin and mentors on a project.

It looks like one of the first steps (in addition to identifying an admin) is to come up with project ideas.

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It was consented in today’s call we meet tomorrow at 10am EAT to come up with a proposal to be submitted to google. All interested members are welcome.

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I’d like to go back to this before too much more time passes. Back in December, @jwnasambu volunteered to lead our efforts to update our documentation. Based on that, it seems to make sense that @jwnasambu would play a key role, such as admin (if you are willing!), with Season of Docs.

Even though this is a little different in some respects to GSoC and GCI, it might be helpful to have someone who is familiar with those ropes be “on call” if any questions come up around anything related to the Google side of things.

What do others think?

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Hello @jennifer I was also thinking that @jwnasambu could be a good pick for this as an admin that is if she is not applying as a tech writer. It’s like from their guidelines , one person takes up one role, no overlapping.

That said, Sorry I missed the meeting I learnt of it late. What transpired, is there a way forward?

We need to brainstorm on the project ideas because we have slightly over a month to the deadline.

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Hello community, in today’s documentation meeting @tendomart and @gcliff volunteered to be our admin and co-admin respectively in GSoD project anyone to second them so that they can take up the responsibility?

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No objection from me. How far is the proposal? Is any one working on it?

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We are meeting tomorrow at 6PM EAT and 3PM UTC time to come up with the proposal. Hope you will attend .

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hello @suthagar23 , My sole purpose for joining the community was for GSOC 2019 but after working for about 1.5 months in the community I feel like working beyond the purpose of GSOC. is there any space in the team creating proposal for season of docs?

I will be delighted to assist.

1 Like
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It is what we are going to deal with today at 6PM EAT and 3PM UTC. If you don’t mind join the call on this link.

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Please join us if you can at UTC 3pm on Uber conference . We need all the help we can get.

Regards

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@dkayiwa thanks for seconding @tendomart as our admin and @gcliff as our co-admin for GSoD project. We are meeting today as @c.antwi has communicated above for proposal writing. Its open to everyone feel free to join.

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hello @c.antwi i am working on some GsoD wiki document at https://wiki.openmrs.org/pages/resumedraft.action?draftId=222593157&draftShareId=54fd55ae-1a0f-4039-bb04-b4ba43f18aa9& kindly requesting for your review

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I would love to see OpenMRS working toward REST API documentation that looks more like GitHub API documentation, Twitter API documentation, or the Google Maps API documenation. Our auto-generated swagger document (like this is incredible scaffolding for documentation, but doesn’t provide the context, tips, and easy read that those richer API docs (weaving human documentation alongside swagger-like documentation) provide.

FYI – Confluence (our wiki) automatically makes a new page the child page of whatever page you are viewing when you create the page. Because of this, it’s easy for folks, especially who are new to Confluence, to create content that isn’t located in the right place. While pages can always be moved later, you can avoid entropy in the wiki by ensuring you are viewing the appropriate parent page when you create a new page. In general, try to avoid creating a page while viewing the home page of any wiki space. I moved the Google Season of Docs pages to the appropriate location in the wiki (alongside other Mentorship & Outreach Programs).

Along this topic, another great project for “Season of Docs” would be to work on developing sustainable approaches to avoiding entropy in our documentation. I mean, coming up with easy mechanisms to help identify and manage documentation improvement. One example, would be coming up with a convention for labeling wiki pages that our outdated or pages in the wrong location. A Confluence macro could be used to display all such tagged pages as an automatic work queue for documentation improvement. Another example would be to create a page or process to identify all pages under “active projects” that haven’t been modified for > 1 year as candidates to be archived.

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cc @c.antwi @tendomart

thanks alot @burke for your guidance and insits on this :+1:

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@burke Thanks alot for the progress ,can you provide the links so we avoid duplication we (me and @gcliff ) had already began harvesting important Info from Google’s GSoD Documentation into our own wikis

cc @c.antwi @jennifer @jwnasambu
We have the following WIP- wikis

OpenMRS GSoD Wiki

OpenMRS GSoD Mentor’s Guide GSoD Admninstrator / Mentor Responsibilities