The Eko (v1.2) release is here!
The Eko release introduced three new templates. We also share some community news.
For several months, The The Good Docs Project has been working hard on the version 1.2.0 (codenamed "Eko"). Why "Eko"? We name our releases after bridges, since we are bridging the documentation gap in open source and beyond. The Eko bridge is located in Lagos, Nigeria. Fun Fact: We have several contributors from Nigeria, many of whom are leaders or prominent members in our community.
Eko templates
Our community is a group of people that are passionate about making documentation easy to write and read. We believe everyone deserves to read good documentation and that everyone should be empowered to write good documentation. Some of the top reasons why non-tech writers struggle with documentation are fear of the blank page or not knowing how to scope information. Our templates help them overcome these hurdles and create great docs!
The Eko release intrdouces three new templates:
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Contact support
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Glossary
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User personas
Let’s take a closer look at these templates!
Contact support template
The Contact support template authored by community member, Christine Belzie, is a fantastic starting point for you to create a contact support page for your project. A contact support page typically consists of communication channels, discussion forums and links to other resources to assist your users with issues that they are having with your product. This page can also provide insights into the user experience, which can be helpful in improving the product and the onboarding process.
Christine is a a member of the Team Alpaca templates working group. She has been actively working on this template for close to year. When asked about her template writing process, Christine shared:
To create this template and its accompanying resources, I initially wrote it from the perspective of the customer. However after talking to senior project members, Alyssa Rock and Cameron Shorter, I realized that the final draft should also include information on how the company influences the creation of a contact support page. So, I did some in-depth research on topics such as customer service strategies and customer satisfaction rates, then added this information.
Check out the Contact support template in our templates GitLab repository!
Glossary template
The glossary template authored by community member, Rachel Stainer, is an excellent addition to The Good Docs Project’s template suite as it was one of the most highly requested content types when we first created our template roadmap. The glossary template will assist us in forming the foundation for other important work in the glossary working group and The Chronologue. Rachel researched and worked on this template for nearly a year as a member of the Team Alpaca templates working group.
You can use our glossary template to help identify and document terms and definitions related to a specific topic that may be unfamiliar to your reader or product user.
Check out the Glossary template in our templates GitLab repository!
User personas template
Last but not least, we are very excited to release our user personas template authored by project member and Team Alpaca template working group lead, Ailine Dominey. The primary purpose of user personas is to guide teams and stakeholders toward decisions that are closely aligned to user needs. You can use our template to fill out your relevant user characteristics to create user personas for your project.
Ailine thoroughly researched this template, beginning in the summer of 2023. She planned and conducted a user persona research project for the Salt Project which led to her documenting real user personas. As a result of her research and hard work, she received highly positive feedback from the Salt user community and maintainers. When asked about her template writing process, Ailine shared:
Prior to working on the user personas template, I had a limited understanding of personas. It’s easy to overlook their value until you have the chance to create and apply them. Thankfully, I had the opportunity to work with Alyssa Rock, a phenomenal mentor, to create user personas as part of a larger effort to improve documentation for the Salt Project. Through that open-source project, we conducted user research to establish the Salt user personas.
The real-world experience gained from the Salt Project, combined with abundant, valuable feedback from community members of The Good Docs Project, helped shape the user personas template. Our goal was to create a template that provides essential considerations for developing the kind of user personas that serve as effective guides for making user-responsive product decisions. Personally, I see the takeaway benefits for user personas as follows: they give you a birds-eye view of what makes each type of user distinct, and at the same time, tap into the behind-the-screen motivations that drive each user in their interaction with your product or project.
I’m grateful to everyone who took the time to share their feedback on the TGDP user personas template. I hope it will be helpful to those looking to bring more user perspective into their work.
Check out the User personas template in our templates GitLab repository!
Templates style guide
When writing our templates, our templateeers reference our style guide. Our style guide empowers community members to create templates that are consistent in style and tone. The great, big process of creating our style guide was led by Ane Tröger, in collaboration with the template product management team and template editorial team. Well done, Ane!
Community news
Our community has been hard at work ever since its inception in 2019. We’d like to congratulate Cameron Shorter, one of our founding members on 5 years of being a cornerstone of this community. After running several review sessions and collaborating with many community members, Cameron created our commenting guide for collaborative document reviews. This guide shares numerous practical tips for both authors and reviewers for a productive and succesful review session.
There’s more achievements to celebrate! Lana Novikova was awarded an Open Source Peer Bonus from Google for her contributions with the project.
Project steering committee
Our project steering committee has grown and we are thrilled to welcome the following contributors into our leadership team:
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Ailine Dominey
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Ane Tröger
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Bolaji Ayodeji
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Lana Novikova
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Michael Vallance
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Valeria Hernández
Co-chairs
The Good Docs Project has welcomed Michael Park as our new co-chair! Michael is now co-chairing the project with Tina Lüdtke. Carrie Wattula has completed her two year term as a co-chair and we thank her for her service.
Tech team
The Tech team has been working closely in cooperation with the UX and Outreach team to overhaul our website. Our website now has a fresh new design with streamlined navigation that makes it easy for people to learn about our project and join our community. This was a massive effort and we’re excited to reveal it as part of the Eko release.
Alongside our blog and template guides, you can now find our latest The Good Docs Project offering, Tatics. Tactics are a series of articles that provide guidance and best practices on a variety of topics related to improving your documentation.
UX and Outreach
In addition to working closely on the website with the Tech team, UX and Outreach has focused their energy on conducting user research and growing our core user base. This group researched and drafted our Outreach Strategy which defines our users journey from initial discovery of our templates to successfully implementing our templates in their projects and sharing their success stories with others. The Outreach Strategy explains what future content and initiatives we will create to take our users through this journey.
The UX and Outreach working group wants to hear from you! We encourage you to take our doc maintainers survey and share your experiences with us so that we can identify how to best help you in creating and maintaining great documentation effectively.
The Good Docs Project’s co-chair and UX working group leader, Tina Lüdtke presented at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit - North America 2024. Check out Tina’s talk, where she shares the importance of understanding your users so that you can create documentation that is clear, concise and easy to understand.
Tina also recently presented on the The Content Wrangler, where she introduced The Good Docs Project. In her talk, Tina shared how our community fosters collaboration among technical writers, software developers and UX designers while providing mentorship and networking opportunities.
Community managers
The community managers welcomed Cat Keller to the team. Cat is leading our initiative of "Fostering a positive community culture". We’re excited to see what interesting ideas she brings about how to best meet this objective!
As part of the community management team’s initiative to onboard, mentor and train community members, The Good Docs Project launched our Welcome Wagon meeting program last year.
The Welcome Wagon meetings are hosted by Alyssa Rock and Michael Vallance. Our working group leads and seasoned community members also join as welcomers. The purpose of the Welcome Wagon is to introduce welcomees to the community, familiarize them with our Code of Conduct, discuss their interests and connect them to leaders of the working group of their choice.
Due to the great success of the Welcome Wagon, we offer friendly meeting times in the AMER, EMEA and APAC regions. This release cycle is the first cycle where our community has offered additional Welcome Wagon time slots for contributors in APAC and EMEA to give them more meeting time options.
The majority of newcomers that have attended our Welcome Wagon are located in the West Africa Time (WAT) timezone (18%). Welcome!
How do newcomers hear about us? The majority of welcomees found us through internet search (27.5%). Before attending the Welcome Wagon, many folks heard about us from active community members (7.5%).
If you are interested in learning more about The Good Docs Project, we invite you to our Welcome Wagon.
A look ahead
Recently, a few tooling providers and other organizations have stated their interest to incorporate our templates into their products and processes and establish a more formal relationship with us. We see this as an exciting tipping point and validation of the value our templates and community bring. It introduces both opportunities and challenges for us. We are in the process of establishing a partner program, and inviting potential partners to help us shape such a program.
To read about our exciting partnership with GitLab, see the the partnership announcment on the GitLab Open Source Partners page and our blost post, We are GitLab Open Source Partners.
A huge thank-you to all our contributors and collaborators on the Eko release! With your great contributions, we can continue to grow a supportive, diverse, passionate, and fun-loving community.
Help us improve in the next release:
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If you have 5 minutes and a project lined up: Use our templates! Every template has a survey link at the bottom, so let us know how it went.
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If you have 10 minutes: Take our doc maintainers survey. We can prioritize work aids for content maintainers, if we understand their pain points.
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If you have 2-3 hours per week: Feel free to share your documentation best practices as a contributor.
Text of article ©2024 The Good Docs Project
Released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)