Announcing Templates release 1.6 (Iron)

The Iron release includes a brand new template contribution from Team Dolphin (Templates AMER/EMEA). We’re thrilled to congratulate Elena Baska on her first template contribution to the project: the Software Development Kit (SDK) Overview template, the first part of a proposed template pack for SDKs.

This template teaches SDK writers to craft an effective introduction for SDKs, and it will be genuinely useful for anyone developing that kind of documentation. We’re also looking forward to the next template in the pack, a getting started guide for SDKs, which Elena has already started working on.

In Elena’s own words, she built the template to make SDK documentation more consistent and reusable, so anyone can pick it up and adapt it to their own project rather than starting from scratch. The template gives writers a clear structure for covering the essentials: what the SDK is, what it does, and where to go next. And this is just the beginning. More is on the way, so stay tuned!

Elena’s project did more than add to our template library. It was also instrumental in helping us refine our template development process. Team Dolphin used her template to experiment with better approaches to community reviews, and it was one of the first templates to go through our new editorial review process. Great work, Elena! 🎉

A big thank-you to Elena Baska for authoring the template, to working group lead Dina Bennet, and former working group lead Valeria Hernandez for their support throughout the project. Thanks also to Maggie H.D. and Alyssa Rock from the template editorial team for their quality feedback during reviews.

The Chronologue is our fictional documentation project, used to show what Good Docs templates look like in practice. It spans three documentation sets: OCTAVIA (the API documentation), KronoPy (the open-source community), and Zaius Inc. (the commercial software platform).

We want to give a huge congratulations to Carrie M. from the Chronologue team for merging in a wonderful example of the open source contributing guide template: the KronoPy contributing guide. This is a high quality example of our template in action, and Carrie’s project turned out to have some really meaningful benefits for the project beyond just adding a new example.

On the template side, working through this project helped us identify some important improvements needed in the original template, which we plan to incorporate going forward. On the process side, we learned a lot about where friction can build up in our contributing process, particularly around catching issues earlier before projects reach the merge request stage. We’ve made changes on both the Chronologue and template side to address this, and we’re hopeful those improvements will make the experience smoother for future contributors. Great work, Carrie!

Congratulations also go to Thad F. from Chronologue Team Dolphin, whose concept example for our fictional software company Zaius, Inc. was completed during this release. This is a first for the Zaius documentation and a genuinely exciting addition. Together with Carrie’s contributing guide, it marks the Chronologue’s comeback to publishing documentation after two release cycles, which is a big win for the whole team. A huge thank you to everyone who helped make this happen.

Special thanks to the author, Thad F, and to Michael Hungbo and Andrea Wright who provided guidance throughout the drafting process. Thad also shared that it’s been a delight working with the Chronologue and Chronologue Editorial teams since he started contributing last year. Well done, team!

We’re pleased to welcome Ariel Kaiser and Deirdre French as new members of the Project Steering Committee (PSC)!

This cycle, the co-chairs put together a document describing the current state of the project and a vision for where the project might become in the future. They worked to build consensus around it with the Project Steering Committee (PSC) and the broader community, and brought forward ideas from last cycle’s brainstorming sessions to see which possible themes for future directions resonated most with the community leaders.

From there, the co-chairs asked the PSC to assess and vote on the project vision. After some great discussion, the PSC landed on three potential themes for TGDP to focus on and grow into: documentation excellence, AI, and potentially evolving into a fully open source documentation consulting team.

To get to that future state, we’re bringing together a few overlapping ideas that had the strongest support: documentation excellence research and advocacy with documentation standards alliance, AI documentation governance with AI-ready documentation infrastructure, and open source documentation team with documentation consulting team.

This is an exciting time for TGDP and we can’t wait to see where these conversations take us as we refine the project vision.

In addition to the new concept and contributing guide examples mentioned above, the Chronologue working group spent time this cycle getting clearer on what we actually know about the Chronologue world. They generated a list of open questions, worked through answers to the highest priority ones, and shared those answers with the other working groups for feedback. It’s the kind of work that makes a real difference to the consistency of Chronologue content going forward.

Previously, Chronologue work was split across Team Macaw (APAC and EMEA) and Team Dolphin (AMER and EMEA). This cycle, we made the decision to consolidate Chronologue under Team Dolphin. The Chronologue is a collaborative project at heart, and we found that working across multiple time zones asynchronously made that collaboration harder than it needed to be. Moving to one team means tighter communication and a stronger, more connected Chronologue community.

The community managers successfully completed a listening tour with working group leads, conducting interviews to understand where support would be most helpful and to hear what’s been working well. They used that research to put together an outline for a set of resources specifically for working group leads and plan to collaborate with the Knowledge Base to produce this helpful guide for working group leads.

The UX working group completed a report summarizing the findings from user research conducted during the previous cycle. Those findings fed directly into the project vision discussions and will help shape several crucial conversations in the next release cycle including which template files we provide for each template, our target users, and how to best reach them and meet their needs.

The knowledge base working group has been busy figuring out where things go, which sounds simple but makes a huge practical difference. They kicked things off by going on a listening tour, attending other working groups to interview members and gather ideas for what content belongs in the knowledge base. Those ideas are now sitting in the backlog and will feed into a card sorting activity to help shape the information architecture. From there, they are defining the basic structure of the knowledge base, so there’s now a clear answer to the question "where should this new article live?" They also defined the target personas for the knowledge base, which will guide what content gets created next.

The outreach team is busy preparing a community event called the Blog-a-thon, a tech writing hackathon. The goal is to collaborate with both community members and external contributors to generate a batch of blog posts for The Good Docs Project’s blog. More details are coming soon, so keep an eye out!

The tech team ran experiments with holding project meetings in Discord and built out the logistical infrastructure for handling inactive members, something that had been on the to-do list for a while and will help keep the project’s membership in good shape. Implementing our inactive members policy allows us to get a more accurate view of our current active members (as mentioned at the top of the community news).

After careful consideration and discussion, we have made the decision to retire the DocOps Registry working group. Attendance numbers made it difficult to sustain the initiative going forward, but we hope to reform the group at a later time as the work coming out of this group has been truly valuable to the project. A special thank-you to Rick L. for leading the group over the past year, and to previous leads Bryan Klein and Michael Park, and to all members who contributed along the way. The GitLab repository has been archived but remains publicly accessible as a resource.

We truly enjoy working with our partners and are excited about the opportunities ahead. We’re currently exploring potential partnerships with Twilio and CASS and can’t wait to share more as things develop!