During the program, technical writers spent a few months working closely with an open source community. They brought their technical writing expertise to improve the project's documentation while the open source projects provided mentors to introduce the technical writers to open source tools, workflows, and the project's technology.
The technical writers and their mentors did a fantastic job with the inaugural year of Season of Docs! Participants represented countries across all continents except for Antarctica! 36 technical writers out of 41 successfully completed their standard-length technical writing projects, and there are eight long-running projects in progress that are expected to finish in February.
Technical writing projects ranged from beginners' guides and tutorials to API and reference documentation; all of which benefited a diverse set of open source projects that included programming languages, software, compiler infrastructure, operating systems, software libraries, hardware, science, healthcare, and more. Take a look at the list of successful projects to see the wide range of subjects covered!
If you were excited about participating, please do write social media posts. See the promotion and press page for images and other promotional materials you can include, and be sure to use the tag #SeasonOfDocs when promoting your ideas on social media. To include the tech writing and open source communities, add #WriteTheDocs, #techcomm, #TechnicalWriting, and #OpenSource to your posts.
Stay tuned for information about Season of Docs 2020—watch for posts in this blog and sign up for the announcements email list.
By Andrew Chen, Google Open Source and Sarah Maddox, Cloud Docs
- 91.7% of the mentors had a positive experience and want to mentor again in future Season of Docs cycles
- 88% of the technical writers had a positive experience
- 96% plan to continue contributing to open source projects
- 100% of the technical writers said that Season of Docs helped improved their knowledge of code and/or open source
Technical writing projects ranged from beginners' guides and tutorials to API and reference documentation; all of which benefited a diverse set of open source projects that included programming languages, software, compiler infrastructure, operating systems, software libraries, hardware, science, healthcare, and more. Take a look at the list of successful projects to see the wide range of subjects covered!
What is next?
The long-running projects are still in progress and finish in February 2020. Technical writers participating in these long-running projects submit their project reports by Feb. 25, and the writer and mentor evaluations are due by Feb. 28. Successfully completed long-running technical writing projects are then published on the results page on March 6, 2020.If you were excited about participating, please do write social media posts. See the promotion and press page for images and other promotional materials you can include, and be sure to use the tag #SeasonOfDocs when promoting your ideas on social media. To include the tech writing and open source communities, add #WriteTheDocs, #techcomm, #TechnicalWriting, and #OpenSource to your posts.
Stay tuned for information about Season of Docs 2020—watch for posts in this blog and sign up for the announcements email list.
By Andrew Chen, Google Open Source and Sarah Maddox, Cloud Docs
