The Good Docs Project Templates (v0.2.0) release is here!

We started this project to help out open-source developers with their documentation efforts, namely by providing templates both easy to adopt and robust in use. That’s a tall order! This working group concentrates efforts on a few core templates at a time, continually writing and peer-reviewing to provide something we’re confident that hits both of those marks.

We’re proud to release v0.2 of our templates, and we’re on track to keep adding and iterating on our templates in 2022 and beyond. If you’re interested in contributing to our templates, say hello on our Slack’s #templates channel. We have a few sub-groups, and are happy to connect you to a group that works for you!

One of our "templateers" is presenting at Write the Docs Portland 2022! Check out Chris Ganta’s talk, where he shares our group’s experience in peer writing.

Another arm of our project focuses on sharing advice, experiences, nuance, and more-through our new blog! We created this group last year, as a way to provide useful information that doesn’t quite fit in templates, but would still help our users produce stronger documentation.

We launched the blog earlier this month! So far we’ve covered: - Marketing yourself - Why you need a tech writing portfolio, by Felicity Brand - 3 tricks to overcome writer’s block, by Ryan Macklin - And this post you’re reading now

Our aim is one article every two weeks, but our priorities are in quality posts with utility, not just posting for the sake of a constant rhythm. If you’re interested in contributing to this working group, check out the #blog channel.

We have a really fun group of people who produce a living example of our templates, for a fictitious project called the Chronologue! It puts our templates and practices to use documenting an application to view remarkable moments in time from the past and the future.

Our Chronologue group provides critical feedback for the templates, serving as a quality assurance group. We believe everyone can contribute to Chronologue, and currently have team members with coding, tech writing, and UX expertise on board to craft high-quality examples of what good documentation looks like.

Does this sound interesting to you? Come by the #chronologue-docs channel!

One of our newer working groups spun off to focus on helping people address the age-old question in documentation: "How do you convince leadership to invest in docs?" We’re in the brainstorming and bulleting out phase of the project, and have also collated a docs fact pack of great quotes.

If you want to help create great pitches for leadership, come introduce yourself in the #business-case channel.

Making documentation easier for open source developers isn’t just about writing the material, we also consider how to build and deploy documentation using our templates. But with the numerous platforms in the world, and how that number just gets bigger over time, the Doc Tools group recently shifted its goal to: Provide a set of high-level functional requirements for documentation systems, and starter templates, that are compatible with the overall vision of The Good Docs Project.

At the moment, this group is fairly thin, due to people involved also being involved in other critical parts of the project. This group’s ambition over the next couple release cycles is to get a strong foundation going. If that sounds of interest to you, we’d love to have you over at the #doctools channel! Especially if you have a strong interest in a specific content platform, because down the road we want to have examples of this in action for different platforms.

Glossaries are easy to set up for a simple use case, but hard to scale across teams and organizations. Within the Glossaries working group we are tackling how to establish sharable glossaries, which inherit terms from more authoritative glossaries. We are working on standards, scripting tools and processes to make it super-easy for any documentarian to add glossaries and popup term definitions to websites.

Are you passionate about what words mean, reach out to Cameron in the #glossaries channel.

Community docs is one of our template sub-groups focused on what an open-source community needs to communicate goals and updates. They’re working on templates for READMEs, contributing guides, and changelogs. But they do something more than that, which is why they’re under this header: they also handle a lot of key internal needs that keep the project running.

Notably, this group also handles the critical role of onboarding new members around the globe. For instance, we routinely hold git training sessions for new members who are passionate about documentation but don’t have much or any experience with git and open source in general.

If you’re interested in how to keep the heart of a community beating, come talk with them at #community-docs.

If it sounds like our overall project doesn’t have focus, you’d be right! At least, you would have been a year ago. Content strategy came about because we recognized a need to have focus with our project, lest all of our efforts and passions spread us too thin and in conflicting directions.

Last year, we recognized that we needed to build a comprehensive strategy for all of our content: the overall website, the advocate and education material, the templates, social media, etc. But rather than the group "reining in" our members' passions, it’s working to provide the structure needed to help our members accomplish goals and deliverables.

This blog post and the tweet pointing to it are two examples of this group’s successes, not directly, but through empowerment. Thank you, CS! Check out #content-strategy to find out what they’re up to next.

Speaking of focus, we’ve mentioned "release cycles" in this article, but what does that mean for our project? Well, that’s what this group is tasked to handle! Last year, we decided that we want to peg significant releases timed around Write the Docs conferences. They are useful deadlines since as many of us are actively engaged in that community.

The release management group’s first big public-facing achievement is this season’s release! But they’ve had a lot of smaller milestones achieved over the last several months, which paved the way for our project to have a coherent release strategy. You can engage with that group in our #general channel.