Tag Archives: writing

Season of Docs announces 2020 technical writing projects

Season of Docs has announced the technical writers participating in the program and their projects! You can view a list of organizations and technical writing projects on the website.

The program received over 500 technical writer applications, and with them, over 800 technical writing project proposals. The enthusiasm from the technical writing and open source communities has been amazing!

What is next?

During the community bonding period from August 17 to September 13, mentors must work with the technical writers to prepare them for the doc development phase. By the end of community bonding, the technical writer should be familiar with the open source project and community, understand the product as a whole, establish communication channels with the mentoring organization, and set clear goals and expectations for the project. These are critical to the successful completion of the technical writing project.

Documentation development begins on September 14, 2020.

What is Season of Docs?

Documentation is essential to the adoption of open source projects as well as to the success of their communities. Season of Docs brings together technical writers and open source projects to foster collaboration and improve documentation in the open source space. You can find out more about the program on the introduction page of the website.

During the program, technical writers spend a few months working closely with an open source community. They bring their technical writing expertise to the project's documentation and, at the same time, learn about the open source project and new technologies.

The open source projects work with the technical writers to improve the project's documentation and processes. Together, they may choose to build a new documentation set, redesign the existing docs, or improve and document the project's contribution procedures and onboarding experience.

General timeline
August 16Google announces the accepted technical writer projects
August 17 - September 13Community bonding: Technical writers get to know mentors and the open source community, and refine their projects in collaboration with their mentors
September 14 - December 5Technical writers work with open source mentors on the accepted projects, and submit their work at the end of the period
January 6, 2021Google publishes the list of successfully-completed projects

See the full timeline for details, including the provision for projects that run longer than three months.

Find out more

Explore the Season of Docs website at g.co/seasonofdocs to learn more about the program. Use our logo and other promotional resources to spread the word. Check out the FAQ for further questions!

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

Making the Google Developers Documentation Style Guide Public

Cross-posted on the Google Developers Blog

You can now use our developer-documentation style guide for open source documentation projects.

For some years now, our technical writers at Google have used an internal-only editorial style guide for most of our developer documentation. In order to better support external contributors to our open source projects, such as Kubernetes, AMP, or Dart, and to allow for more consistency across developer documentation, we're now making that style guide public.

If you contribute documentation to projects like those, you now have direct access to useful guidance about voice, tone, word choice, and other style considerations. It can be useful for general issues, like reminders to use second person, present tense, active voice, and the serial comma; it can also be great for checking very specific issues, like whether to write "app" or "application" when you want to be consistent with the Google Developers style.

The style guide is a reference document, so instead of reading through it in linear order, you can use it to look things up as needed. For matters of punctuation, grammar, and formatting, you can do a search-in-page to find items like "Commas," "Lists," and "Link text" in the left nav. For specific terms and phrases, you can look at the word list.

Keep an eye on the guide's release notes page for updates and developments, and send us your comments and suggestions via the Send Feedback link on each page of the guide—we want to hear from you as we continue to evolve the style guide.

Posted by Jed Hartman, Technical Writer

Making the Google Developers documentation style guide public

Posted by Jed Hartman, Technical Writer

You can now use our developer-documentation style guide for open source documentation projects.

For some years now, our technical writers at Google have used an internal-only editorial style guide for most of our developer documentation. In order to better support external contributors to our open source projects, such as Kubernetes, AMP, or Dart, and to allow for more consistency across developer documentation, we're now making that style guide public.

If you contribute documentation to projects like those, you now have direct access to useful guidance about voice, tone, word choice, and other style considerations. It can be useful for general issues, like reminders to use second person, present tense, active voice, and the serial comma; it can also be great for checking very specific issues, like whether to write "app" or "application" when you want to be consistent with the Google Developers style.

The style guide is a reference document, so instead of reading through it in linear order, you can use it to look things up as needed. For matters of punctuation, grammar, and formatting, you can do a search-in-page to find items like "Commas," "Lists," and "Link text" in the left nav. For specific terms and phrases, you can look at the word list.

Keep an eye on the guide's release notes pagefor updates and developments, and send us your comments and suggestions via the Send Feedback link on each page of the guide—we want to hear from you as we continue to evolve the style guide.