Google Season of Docs Proposal Guide


Please use this document as a guideline so that you have a rough idea of what the Season of Docs mentors at Mautic are looking for.

If you have any questions or remarks, please post them in the #season-of-docs channel on Slack (get your invite here in case you’re not in our Slack organisation yet) and we’ll be happy to discuss them further with you.

Google’s official “Creating a technical writing application” is the main source of information on how to structure your proposal, but in this document we’d like to give you some guidelines specific to Mautic that will help us to more efficiently review all proposals.

Available projects

Developer documentation/End-user documentation/Knowledgebase. Find all information at https://www.mautic.org/blog/community/mautic-applies-google-season-docs

Project proposal

Take the steps outlined at https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs/docs/tech-writer-application-hints#project_proposal as a basis for your proposal. Over there, you’ll find a section called “A detailed description”. For that part we’d like to provide some guidelines below.

My first impressions when going through the existing documentation

Please be honest! We’re actively trying to lower the barrier for new users/contributors and having a “first-time-right” experience is crucial to improve the experience.

If you clearly indicate the things that you ran into when first looking at the docs, then that experience can serve as a good problem description of the area you’d like to improve.

Also feel free to comment on how easy it is to contribute to the documentation - we are keen to improve this as well as how it serves the community who use Mautic.

The area I’d like to contribute to

Our docs have several sections. For the developer docs, we e.g. have “REST API”, “Plugins”, “Themes”, and for the end-user docs, we e.g. have “Campaigns” and “Contacts”. Please be as specific as possible as to the area you’d like to contribute to; that might also mean introducing areas in the docs that don’t exist yet!

We have outlined some projects that we think need work in the blog post linked earlier, but you might see other opportunities of how you can bring your skills to benefit our community. Please do feel free to propose your own projects, incorporating what you have learned from the team and what you have experienced from using Mautic or exploring our documentation resources.

Give consideration to how your proposal will benefit users of Mautic, the project and the community as a whole. Also consider how your specific skills as a technical writer bring something new.

Think about how you can align your proposal to our mission and areas of focus which you can find in the most recent webinars linked on this page https://www.mautic.org/blog/press/mautic-community-introduces-multiple-major-improvements

How do I expect my knowledge/experience to be beneficial to this project?

If you have specific knowledge or experience that you think is relevant to your contribution, please let us know.

We are aware that Google is already asking for your “Recent technical writing experience”, but we’re just curious how you expect to link your knowledge/experience to your ideas.

This allows us to see if there’s a good match between your knowledge/experience and your ideas, and potentially find an even better match together with you.

Good luck writing your proposal! Remember: always feel free to ask questions in the #season-of-docs channel on Slack.

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