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GSoD Technical Writer Selection Process

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Ayan Sinha Mahapatra edited this page Mar 17, 2023 · 24 revisions

Thank you for your interest in creating technical documentation for aboutcode.org! These are the projects which will be the focus of GSoD 2023:

OUR EXPECTATIONS

Technical Writing Experience

Having sufficient technical writing experience is a must to participate in Google Season of Docs.

You should have been actively writing technical documentation, and have multiple publicly available samples of your work. They could be:

  • Documentation work for projects/organizations
  • Works samples if you are a technical documentation writer
  • Blog posts on technical topics
  • Other Tutorials/Guides you have authored
  • API documentation authored by you

And anything else that can be categorized as technical documentation. Note that GSoD is for reasonably experienced technical writers who have decent experience, so if you are just starting your documentation journey or only have a couple of blog posts, you might not be a good fit for this program. And this lowers your chance of getting selected as all participating organizations typically receive lots of interest from seasoned tech writers. You are still welcome to participate and contribute documentation in our projects though, we really appreciate all contributions.

Familiarity with Sphinx, RTD, git/GitHub

You should have experience writing documentation in a Sphinx/reStructuredText environment where the documentation is managed side by side with the code in a GitHub project repository. We treat technical documentation like code, tested for successful builds and checked with linters for quality control. We are open to more suggestions here, and setting up more org-wide processes for documentation.

Eagerness to learn about and document our projects

We expect you to try out our project(s) and understand the use cases, workflows, output data, UI flows or command-line options, i.e. familiarize yourself with them, and to be eager to learn and document all aspects of them, particularly Reference documentation, How-To Guides and Tutorials.

Here are some suggestions for you to consider as documentation topics:

  • Did you encounter any difficulties installing the project(s) locally? Assuming that you resolved them, can you improve the documentation to help others?
  • Many users of PURLdb would like to have a better understanding of what the tool is, what are it's components, how they work internally, and how it can be used in their workflows. If you are willing to research that to understand it more deeply, documentation in this area would be greatly appreciated by the community.
  • Did you encounter any difficulties installing and using vulnerablecode locally or from the public instance? Assuming that you resolved them, can you improve the documentation to help others?
  • Do you understand all the data attributes in the scancode-toolkit/scancode.io output data format clearly? There is some documentation/doc-strings with the code/attribute definition, can you find and bring them all in one place and generate a reference documentation out of it?
  • Do you understand all the specific words and concepts used in the aboutcode community? Are there concepts/words which can be better explained with documentation? Will you be interested in taking this up?
  • Do you understand how to interpret and get full value from these applications? How would you document ways to get the most out of these tools?

We use Diataxis - as a design framework for our documentation.

Reach out to us if you have any specific questions on setting up and using these tools locally or in general. Link to Gitter Chat

Bonus Items

These points are there only to document what makes you stand out as a prospective technical writer to us, but none of them are required/necessary as these are more advanced and can be acquired after the selection procedure (with help from us).

  • Familiarity with software license/vulnerabilities
  • Familiarity with python/django
  • Ability to read and understand large codebases
  • Small documentation contributions to/about our projects
  • Pointing out and suggesting fixes for gaps in our current documentation

STATEMENT OF INTEREST

Applicants are expected to submit a Statement of Interest to aboutcode, see the [GSoD Official Template] for more information on this. Also go through the tech writer guide to make sure you understand the program and it's requirements.

Please share your statement of interest as a publicly viewable document, preferably in Google Docs, to [email protected] [CC to [email protected] and [email protected]]. This enables us to review and comment on your statement of interest to ask for clarifications or suggest changes. (Make sure we have commenting access).

It should have the following minimum sections:

There are two stages to share a statement of interest:

  1. before the organization selection announcement, share only your personal/professional info with your preferred choice of project. this is only your draft statement of interest. (submit before 31 march)
  2. After the organization is selected, please update this statement of interest with the project chosen by aboutcode, with solution elements, details and a breakdown of the associated tasks with their timeline. (submit before 17 april)

See https://github.com/nexB/aboutcode/wiki/GSOD-2023#our-project-ideas for more details on our project ideas.

Note that you may suggest a project, a budget and your project timeline, but this is subject to approval from aboutcode, and we might want to discuss this further. Also we would be taking the final decision on all matters regarding which project we want to go forward with, the budget we want to set and the timeline, and your suggestion merely gives us an idea of what you are comfortable with, and what is the general interest of participants, to help us take the final decision.

IMPORTANT DATES

  • March 20: Draft Statement of Interest submission to aboutcode starts
  • March 24: Aboutcode submits proposal to Google Season of Docs (publicly available)
  • March 31: Deadline to submit Draft Statement of Interest to aboutcode
  • March 31: Google announces accepted organizations
  • April 1 - April 17: More Discussion on aboutcode proposed project
  • April 17: Deadline to submit updated Statement of Interest for the selected aboutcode project
  • April 18 - May 1: Interviews with shortlisted candidates
  • May 4: We announce our technical writer selection
  • May 10: Google Season of Docs Technical Writing Hiring Deadline

See also the official GSoD timeline

All dates are for AoE timezone (Anywhere on earth).

LINKS

The timeline and other details are subject to change, watch this space and our element chatroom for updates.

http://aboutcode.org/

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