What would participants from Season Of Docs 2019 recommend for 2020?

[Cameron Shorter]

Erin, all,

I'd be keen to hear from Season of Docs 2019 participants about what worked and didn't work in their 2019 experience.

* What advice would this group want to pass onto the next season?

* What doc tasks did we find added the most value to our open source projects?

* What would we encourage be in the selection criteria for ideas in 2020?

I was one of the Season of Docs mentors and wrote a blog about our experience which was picked up by the opensource.org news site [1].

Highlights for me were:

* We got a lot of value by asking for a doc audit by our tech writers (we were lucky enough to have 2 writers).

* We found that having tech writers create writing templates for us amplified the effectiveness of our developers/users.

* We have kicked off TheGoodDocsProject [2] - creating doc templates for open source projects. While the project is still in early stages, we have put out an alpha set of templates. It would be good to have collaborators from other open source communities worth with us to refine and extend our template set.

* In retrospect, it would have been valuable to ask our tech writers for a documentation strategy which our volunteers could then work to. (This is likely more than a 3 month engagement could achieve, especially as I think it would require follow on mentorship afterwards.) However, it would be valuable to have a template strategy which we could put into TheGoodDocsProject and make available for all.

[1] https://opensource.com/article/20/4/documentation

[2] https://thegooddocsproject.dev/

Warm regards,

Cameron Shorter

Admin and Mentor for the OSGeo Foundation's Season of Docs involvement.

On Wed, 8 Apr 2020 at 03:26, 'Erin McKean' via Season of Docs - Announce <season-of-d...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Hi folks!

We’ll be hosting Q&A sessions via Google Hangouts to answer all of your Google Season of Docs organization application-related questions.

We’ve scheduled sessions for the following dates and times:

• Monday, April 20th at 17h00 UTC 

• Monday, April 27th at 12h30 UTC 

We'll have other sessions focused on the technical writer application questions in early summer, after the technical writer applications have opened.

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Cameron Shorter

Technology Demystifier

Open Technologies and Geospatial Consultant

M +61 (0) 419 142 254