The Good Docs Project¶

The Good Docs Project is an open source community of 60+ technical writers, doc tools experts, UX designers, and software engineers who are committed to improving the quality of documentation in open source. We aim to educate and empower people to create high-quality documentation by providing them with templates, resources, best practices, and tools to enhance their documentation in open source and beyond.

Our project is divided into small working groups that consist of a few people collaborating together to work on a Good Docs Project initiative or focus area of the project. Throughout Writing Day, we’ll feature workshops that will introduce you to our project and provide feedback on these key initiatives, such as our project to provide templates for a variety of documentation content.

Get an early preview of The Good Docs Project writing day agenda.

Mutual aid for tech writer/documentarian job hunters¶

Note: Second session only

Coordinated by Kenzie Woodbridge, they/them. Kenzie has hosted this session for previous virtual Write the Docs conferences during Writing Day.

Are you thinking of applying for a new or different tech writer/documentarian jobs and would appreciate feedback on your resume? Or, are you responsible for hiring and know what you’re looking for in a resume and application? Let’s get together and offer each other some feedback on the important documentation we’re using to move our careers forward.

Let’s help each other get ready for the job fair!

The Blog Writing Room¶

Struggling to get into blogging? Our project, The Blog Writing Room, is designed to give technical writers and documentarians a space to come together to work on writing blog posts in a supportive and collaborative environment.

Our Writing Day goals:

• Connect with other technical writers and documentarians who want to blog
• Harness the positive momentum of the community to get some blog posts written
• Challenge ourselves to not only write the darn post but share it with the world

You’re welcome to join us any time throughout Writing Day. To make the most of our time together, we have planned two round table discussions and two writing workshops:

• Roundtable 1: “Blogging for non-bloggers”
• Blog writing workshop
• Writing Day snack break
• Roundtable 2: “Best practices for turning conversations into blog posts”
• Blog writing workshop

The workshops are a space for everyone to brainstorm and encourage each other to proverbially “put pen to paper.” We can’t wait to hear your ideas, tips, and tricks - no matter the topic. We’re excited to see you share your knowledge with the Write the Docs

Code for the Carolinas - Codeberg Pages¶

Code for the Carolinas is a small, all-volunteer civic technology organization. We use Codeberg Pages to host our website, learn more about Codeberg.

We want to empower other small volunteer organizations to use Codeberg Page, which is a free, open source software (FOSS) collaboration platform. We recognize that other volunteer organization in our industry may have a volunteers with a wide variety of backgrounds and technical experience. Our mission for Writing Day is to create a beginner-friendly version of the Codeberg Pages documentation to inspire these volunteers to create sustainable and maintainable sites for their organizations.

To accomplish our mission we have created the following Writing Day goals:

• Develop inclusive documentation that welcomes volunteers with a variety of technical backgrounds
• Test the usability of our existing process Wiki entries
• Document general processes for creating pull requests, adding new pages, and reviewing pull requests
• Create process documentation for our admin team to reviewing and merging pull requests

We hope to connect with some folks who can combine their technical writing skill with their knowledge of Codeberg, or similar tools for collaborative software development. We also believe that the process of creating this documentation is a valuable learning experience about questioning assumptions and understanding tools for website creation. We want to ensure that we are setting up ourselves for success and creating sustainable documentation so we can maintain our site and help others along the way.

Depending on timing and interest, there may be additional ooportunities to:

• Use code comments to document HTML and CSS features of our website
• Submit issues or pull requests to Codeberg for corrections to the official documentation

Brainstorm a Help Center Style Guide¶

Note: First session only

As writers and documentarians, many of us have been tasked with creating style guides for the projefts and companies we worked for to standardize and support our documentation efforts.

The Brainstorm a Style Guide project aspires to support writers and documentarians, especially those new to the field, in creating their style guides.

Writing Day goal: Outline a help center style guide that empowers others and helps them write help center articles with a consistent and unified voice.

We have an example style guide to help get you started1

Join us and share your ideas, best practices, and guidelines for style guides! We want to become a springboard for others attendees who are creating style guides for the OSS projects, brands, and the companies they represent.