Highlights from the first-ever Mattermost Docathon

From July 26 through August 6, 2021, Mattermost hosted our first-ever Docathon!

During the event, we invited the technical writers and problem solvers within our Mattermost Community to help improve our product documentation. We were astounded by the outpouring of new submissions and new contributors who joined us for this amazing event.

Over two weeks, we welcomed 178 contributions from 26 individual contributors. We’re honored and grateful to all who participated! 

Everyone who contributed a submission that was merged into one of our documentation codebases will receive a Mattermost swag package for their time and effort. Additionally, contributors who merged more than five submissions into our codebase will also be offered LinkedIn recommendations and endorsements by Mattermost Technical Writers.

The top Mattermost Docathon contributors

The top five Docathon contributions evaluated for their quality, impact, ambition, and innovation will receive a pair of Mattermost branded AirPod Pro headphones. We really appreciate the contributions of our top five prize winners: 

• Arjit Chaudhary (@arjitc): Identified and resolved generated content issues the team was otherwise unaware of.
• Wayne Wollesen (@ewwollesen): Improved bot account and user interface developer documentation, provided redirects between documentation sites, corrected installation instructions, and updated the list and display of supported coding languages. 
• Jordyn Adrales (@jadrales): Provided CLI tool documentation content to determine channel IDs.  
• Alan Lew (@neflyte): Improved build performance by 50%, locked down tooling versions and dependencies to eliminate unexpected updates, upgraded tooling  extensions and scripts to reflect recent releases, documented pipenv dependencies, replaced deprecated markdown parser, cleaned up configuration files, and increased LHS depth.
• Daniel Espino García (@larkox): Improved autolink plugin, updated interactive message button developer documentation, and provided resolutions to documentation build warnings and errors.

We also want to call out the following contributors who participated in the Docathon, and submitted great content:

• Guillermo Vayá (@Willyfrog): Documented custom dictionary functionality in Mattermost Desktop App v4.7 and updated installation instructions for macOS m1.
• Szymon Gibała (@Szymongib): Added SAML configuration FAQ for Mattermost Operator installations.

A really important aspect of the Docathon was the enormous commitment shown by our community members who focused on copy editing and link checking. Their efforts dramatically decreased the workload of our technical writing team and made a huge difference to the customer experience of our documentation.

We are truly thankful for your time and the improvements you provided to make our Mattermost product documentation more accurate and useful. 

We look forward to future Docathon events, as well as ongoing input from the technical writing community within our documentation repositories.

Contributing to Mattermost 

Are you interested in contributing to the Mattermost product documentation, developer documentation, or the Mattermost Handbook? 

Getting started is easy!

Stop by our Docathon 2021 Community channel to say hello and head over to GitHub to browse our open help wanted tickets.

Thanks again to everyone who made our first Mattermost Docathon so special. 

We’ll see you next time!