Write The Docs Prague 2020 — Helping Your Community Contribute to Developer Documentation

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

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.

Helping Your Community Contribute to Developer 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