Google Season of Docs is happy to announce the 2024 program results, including the project case studies.
Google Season of Docs is a grant-based program where open source organizations apply for US$5-15,000 to hire technical writers to complete documentation projects. At the end of the six-month documentation development phase, organizations submit a case study to outline the problems their documentation project was intended to solve, how they are measuring the success of their documentation project, and what they learned during the project. The case studies are publicly available and are intended to help other open source organizations learn best practices in open source documentation.
The 2024 Google Season of Docs documentation development phase began on April 10 and ended November 22, 2024. Participants in the 2024 program will also answer three followup surveys in 2025, in order to better track the impact of these documentation projects over time.
Key Takeaways from 2024 Google Season of Docs
Eleven different organizations participated in the 2024 program. These organizations represented a variety of open source project types, including databases, AI/ML, cloud infrastructure, programming languages, and science and medicine. The documentation projects hoped to address a variety of different problems. The most common challenges addressed by the Season of Docs projects were:
- Project documentation disorganized
- Potential project users having difficulty installing, using, or integrating your project
- Project documentation outdated
- Project documentation needs to be converted to a different tool, platform, or format
- Potential contributors having difficulty onboarding to your project
- Project documentation lacking for a specific key use case
- Potential project users lack fundamental understanding of the project domain
Program participants learned a lot from their projects. These lessons are detailed in the published case studies, to help other open source organizations who are interested in taking on their own documentation projects. Some highlights include:
“Putting time and effort into your project’s infrastructure, such as communication channels and onboarding processes, is really valuable work."
“Perhaps the key piece of advice that we came away with that could be useful for other projects is to be flexible in what you set out to accomplish: what looks like the top-five items on the to-do list on day one may not be what you think is the most important at the end."
“This particular experiment with a different medium has turned out to be successful and we encourage other communities to also explore different media depending on their audience and information needs."
“Developing documentation also helped us identify ambiguities in the interface and other areas of the site design or features that needed refinement or decisions made in order to document them properly. Now, with a base site and well-established documentation workflow, we are documenting more features as they are developed."
Take a look at the participant list to see the initial project plans and case studies for all of the participating projects!
What’s next?
Stay tuned for information about Google Season of Docs 2025 – watch for posts on this blog and sign up for the announcements email list.
By Elena Spitzer and Erin McKean, Google Open Source Programs Office
