We will be applying to participate in another year of Google Season of Docs.
The Project
Audit and Build Project Documentation Tree
The Problem
The GNOME Project has a storied history dating back to the early days of Open Source. In that time frame, the project has grown substantially and with it our body of documentation in our wiki. Unfortunately, our documentation has not kept in sync with the reality of the state of the project.
Phase 1 requires that the candidate audit the entire wiki and work with community members to go through the content and remove content that is no longer applicable or plain wrong. There will be some that clearly need to be archived and some that need to be flagged to be updated. For those that need to be updated, the candidate will work with community members and their mentor to update the documentation to the current situation.
Phase 2 is more challenging. Taking the experience from the audit – modernize the current documentation structure. The candidate will work with their mentor to build a documentation tree that will make sense for the current direction of the GNOME Project. This could mean taking advantage of modern infrastructure like GitLab or looking at alternative documentation technologies that promote easy contributions with low overhead. The key goal is to be able to have an efficient documentation life cycle that will allow GNOME to maintain its documentation into the future.
How We Measure Success
- A successful internship will require these tasks to be complete:
- Audit the entire wiki located at https://wiki.gnome.org/
- Remove all documentation that is determined to be expired
- Flag all documentation that needs to be updated and gets updated
- Build a proposal document that the GNOME project will evaluate and approve as the future direction of manageable documentation for the years ahead
- [Bonus] We have picked an infrastructure technology and created actionable items that volunteers will be able to work on and complete
Recommended Skills
Must have: Basic knowledge of terms and their meanings in the general tech industry and computer languages. Had at least one or two technical documentation projects in the past.
Nice to have: Knowledge of open source, its development model, and some knowledge of the GNOME development model.
Volunteers
- Sriram Ramkrishna will help with answer questions about the wiki, and make introductions to community members
- Sriram Ramkrishna, Kristi Progri will review what will need to be removed/archive. and communicate to the community
- Sriram Ramkrishna, Kristi Progri will review changes to areas that need to be updated
- Sriram Ramkrishna will provide any assistance and/or executive decisions on content
- The GNOME engagement team will review the proposal document on Gitlab for approval
- The GNOME engagement team will provide feedback and guidance on the proposal document
Contact Us
Technical writers interested in working on this project should send an email to gsod-team@gnome.org. Please include links to your technical writing work or portfolio, résumé, or CV.
Budget
| Budget Items | Amount | Total |
| Technical writer | 9000 | 9000 |
| Volunteer stipends (one Mentor) | 500 | 500 |
| Project t-shirts (10 t-shirts) | 200 | 200 |
| Total | 9700 | |
| Downstream donation(10% of the amount) | 970 | 970 |
| Total Amount | 10670 |
About GNOME
GNOME is a worldwide community that creates a desktop environment, applications, and the underlying technology. GNOME has a long history of design-oriented development, and of working on all parts of the stack to create a good user experience. The GNOME documentation team has worked on both user and developer documentation for over two decades and was one of the pioneers in creating modular, topic-oriented help.
The GNOME community is loosely organized, with many teams working on different parts of the project. We strongly value all kinds of contributions, including design, documentation, translations, and outreach. GNOME is more than code.
GNOME has a long history of working with mentoring and outreach programs, including the GNOME Newcomers initiative, Google Summer of Code, and Outreachy (which was incubated in GNOME as the Outreach Program for Women).
Please read our code of conduct.