Working groups

Our project mission statement:

The Good Docs Project educates and empowers people to create high-quality documentation by providing them with resources, best practices, and tools to enhance their documentation in open source and beyond.

To bring that mission to life, our community is organized into working groups that meet on a regular basis to work on the template’s key tasks and initiatives. You can join any one of these working groups and start contributing to the project today!

What are working groups?

A working group consists of two or more project contributors who are collaborating together to work on a Good Docs Project initiative or focus area of the project.

Who can join?

If you are new to The Good Docs Project, begin by filling out the Welcome Wagon registration form to receive an invitation to the project.

After you’ve joined the project, all working groups are open for anyone to join as a general rule. Contributors can belong to as many working groups as they have time for and it’s okay to join a group to observe for a while before contributing. If you are interested in contributing to a working group:

What is the time commitment?

The various working groups generally meet weekly or bi-weekly for an hour. Most community members give about 1-2 hours of their time every week by participating in one of these groups.

Always remember that we’ll take what you can give. You and your family come first, then work, then volunteering. If you can’t keep your working group commitments, that’s okay. Just let your working group leader know.

Which working groups are available?

We have four working groups you can join. Each working group has meeting times available for all time zone regions.

Templates Avatar Templates

This is our main working group. This group creates templates and guides to help people write the most common documentation content types. You can explore our templates suite to see some of the templates that have been built so far and think about contributing one of your own!

Join this group if you’re interested in contributing to our core project. This group is especially good for contributors who are experienced technical writers or software engineers.

Chronologue Avatar Chronologue

The Chronologue working group supports the templates working group by showcasing our templates in action. This working group is creating examples of our templates for a fake tool called the Chronologue, which is a special telescope that uses wormhole technology to view astronomical events at different points in time. This group also provides an important quality check for our templates by ensuring they are easy to use in a real documentation project.

Join this group if you enjoy creative writing, science fiction, and have a good sense of humor. This group is good for contributors who are new to technical writing and would like hands-on experience writing documentation. It’s also great for software engineers who are interested in helping us build our fake tool and API.

Chronologue Avatar UX and Outreach

This working group works on mission critical initiatives to support the template user experience and to help us grow our user community. This group conducts user research, helps set the template roadmap, and works on growing our core user base through various communication channels.

Join this group if you would like to develop complementary skills in UX, product management, copywriting, technical marketing, and more.

DocOps Registry Avatar DocOps Registry

This working group empowers doc teams to choose the best tools for their doc system by creating a searchable database of resources for doc tool tech stacks. You can often dramatically increase your impact as a technical writer by developing your ability to create and maintain your own doc tools. This working group helps you develop these skills by connecting you with other doc tools experts.

Join this group if you are interested in the tooling side of documentation and in making a big impact for doc tool maintainers everywhere.