Project ideas

Current phase:
Project finalization. See timeline.

This page is for open source organizations in the exploration phase of the organization application process. These project ideas are only examples to show how organizations might describe possible documentation projects on the organization's project ideas page; organizations can propose projects not included in this list.

Project Idea: create a contributor onboarding guide

Problem

  • New contributors aren't able to find the setup information they need to make meaningful contributions to our project. Some processes (such as contributing to our tests) aren't documented at all.

How would we measure success?

  • Increase in the number of new contributors
  • Increase in the number of new non-code contributors (by making it easier to contribute to docs or tests)
  • Decrease in the number of issues raised by new contributors
  • Increase in the number of closed issues tagged with "good first issue"

What skills would a technical writer need to work on this project?

  • Must have: Familiarity with GitHub (or willingness to work through GitHub tutorials)
  • Nice to have: Familiarity with our test runner, in order to run our tests and update the documentation for doing so

Volunteers

Encourage community members to sign up to help with specific tasks, for example:

  • @JaneQDev, can help with answering questions about our tests
  • @ChenPCoder, happy to review docs pull requests
  • @ErichJEngineer, can walk through current contribution process with technical writer

Contact info

  • Technical writers interested in working on this project should send an email to email@project. Include links to your technical writing work or portfolio/résumé/CV.

Project Idea: write tutorials to use our library with ...

Problem

  • Our project gets lots of issues raised by users trying to use our library with $TechnologyX. We don't have a clear guide for integrating with $TechnologyX and it can be tricky!

How would we measure success?

  • Decrease in the number of issues tagged "$TechnologyX"
  • Increase in the number pull requests from new contributors helping us fix bugs or adding to documentation around $TechnologyX
  • More links to our project from $TechnologyX projects

What skills would a technical writer need to work on this project?

  • Nice to have: Some familiarity with $TechnologyX

Volunteers

Encourage community members to sign up to help with specific tasks, for example:

  • @JaneQDev, can help with answering questions about $TechnologyX
  • @ChenPCoder, happy to review docs pull requests

Contact info

  • Technical writers interested in working on this project should send an email to email@project. Include links to your technical writing work or portfolio/résumé/CV.

Project Idea: reorganize our documentation

Problem

  • Our documentation is sprawling and disorganized. Many users give up trying to find answers in the documentation and just raise issues or ask questions in our forums instead. Our pages don't come up in search results even for relevant keywords.

How would we measure success?

  • Better SEO for our documentation
  • Decrease in number of issues raised for topics covered in the documentation
  • Increase in number of documentation contributions

What skills would a technical writer need to work on this project?

  • Nice to have: experience reorganizing large and mature documentation sets, understanding of SEO

Volunteers

Encourage community members to sign up to help with specific tasks, for example:

  • @ChenPCoder, happy to review docs pull requests

Contact info

  • Technical writers interested in working on this project should send an email to email@project. Include links to your technical writing work or portfolio/résumé/CV.

Project Idea: run a documentation fixit

Problem

  • We have a lot of little bugs and old issues related to our documentation. Our community would be happy to pitch in and help clean things up, but we need someone to organize and run the actual fixit.

How would we measure success?

  • Number of documentation-related issues closed
  • Increase in number of documentation contributions and new contributors

What skills would a technical writer need to work on this project?

  • Nice to have: experience running a documentation fixit
  • Great organizational skills

Volunteers

Encourage community members to sign up to help with specific tasks, for example:

  • @ChenPCoder, can help organize the video and chat for the fixit and help find volunteers in other time zones

Contact info

  • Technical writers interested in working on this project should send an email to email@project/open an issue or ask in our forum. Include links to your technical writing work or portfolio/résumé/CV.

Project Idea: do a documentation audit

Problem

  • We don't have a good idea of the state of our documentation! It's hard to prioritize documentation improvements because we don't have a roadmap or a sense of what the most urgent problems are. We also have a lot of out-of-date content that should be deleted or archived.

How would we measure success?

  • Creation of a documentation roadmap with general approval from the community
  • Decrease in number of out-of-date or incorrect documentation pages

What skills would a technical writer need to work on this project?

  • Nice to have: experience doing a docs audit

Volunteers

Encourage community members to sign up to help with specific tasks, for example:

  • @JaneQCoder, can help coordinate presenting the documentation roadmap in our community meeting

Contact info

  • Technical writers interested in working on this project should send an email to email@project/open an issue or ask in our forum. Include links to your technical writing work or portfolio/résumé/CV.
  • The promotion and press page includes logos and other content that you can use when talking about Google Season of Docs.
  • This video from PyCon Australia 2017 gives hints about organizing your documentation so that people find it useful: What nobody tells you about documentation by Daniele Procida.