Date: October 20, 2020
Event: Write The Docs Prague conference
Speaker: Diana Lakatos, Director of Documentation at platformOS
How to encourage and help your community to contribute to your developer documentation? In my session at Write The Docs Prague 2020, I showed various — fully remote — processes platformOS developed to help community members contribute content and code to our award-winning developer portal.
Write the Docs is a global community of people who care about documentation. Their conferences, organized on three continents create a time and a place for the global community of documentarians to share information, discuss ideas, and work together to improve the art and science of documentation.
Processes
- How we developed a fully remote editorial workflow that everyone can be a part of (developers, writers, product owners, etc.)
- Why we follow the Docs as Code approach and how we implemented it through GitHub
- How we facilitate the contribution of code and content
- How we continuously improve contributor experience and reward contributions
Tools
- How we iteratively developed our Documentation Style Guide and how we use it
- How we help contributors by providing templates for specific types of content (concept topics, tutorials, etc.)
- Why we chose the Markdown format and how we use it
Communication
- How we communicate with community members
- How we collect and use feedback from our community for all aspects of our documentation (content, design, navigation, etc.)
- How we encourage people to write who are otherwise not confident in their writing skills or don’t enjoy writing
