State of The Good Docs Project

Open source software is an amazing social success story. It creates huge technical value which is shared with the world. However incomplete and outdated documentation is a pervasive problem suffered by most open-source projects.

So a while back, a few of us searched for best practices in tech writing, and were disappointed that we couldn’t easily find it. We found pockets of awesomeness - spread across presentations, blog posts, forums, applications, and organizational specific practices. But there are holes as well, and the pockets are typically disconnected or working in silos. It is also difficult to tell what is awesome and what is not.

So we’ve been building templates and writing instructions, and have been learning a lot about the challenges around creating good docs in the process.

Last year we released our first templates. Now we have expanded our project to cover:

To learn more about our community, see The Good Docs Project.