Season of Docs announces results of 2020 program

Season of Docs has announced the 2020 program results for standard-length projects. You can view a list of successfully completed technical writing projects on the website along with their final project reports.

During the program, technical writers spend a few months working closely with an open source community. They bring 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.

For standard-length technical writing projects in Season of Docs, the doc development phase is September 14, 2020 – November 30, 2020. However, some technical writers may apply for a long-running project. The technical writer makes this decision under consultation with the open source organization, based on the expectations for their project. For a long-running project, the doc development phase is September 14, 2020 – March 1, 2021.

64 technical writers successfully completed their standard-length technical writing projects. There are 18 long-running projects in progress that are expected to finish in March.

• 85% of the mentors had a positive experience and want to mentor again in future Season of Docs cycles
• 96% of the technical writers had a positive experience
• 96% plan to continue contributing to open source projects
• 94% of the technical writers said that Season of Docs helped improved their knowledge of code and/or open source

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 March 2021. Technical writers participating in these long-running projects submit their project reports before March 8th, and the writer and mentor evaluations are due by March 12th. Successfully completed long-running technical writing projects will be published on the results page on March 15, 2021.

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 project 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 2021—watch for posts in this blog and sign up for the announcements email list.

By Kassandra Dhillon and Erin McKean, Google Open Source Programs Office