Mattermost Joins Google’s Inaugural Season of Docs Program
At Mattermost, we believe in the power of open source software and open companies.
To this end, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve been accepted into Google’s inaugural Season of Docs, a new program designed to highlight the promise of open source technology while raising awareness of the critical role docs and the technical writers who create them play in the success of open source projects.
More than 200 open source projects applied to participate in the Season of Docs pilot; Mattermost was one of 50 projects selected.
If you’re a technical writer interested in participating in the Season of Docs and contributing to open source documentation, applications are due by June 28 (here’s the full timeline).
Why Mattermost invests in documentation
As an open source organization, documentation is very important to us for three main reasons:
1. Docs make it easy to create a culture of transparency
We believe that transparent organizations are more effective. We use docs to thoroughly chronicle everything, including our development, release, community, and security release processes, what it’s like to work at Mattermost, and even our approach to marketing.
2. Docs make it easy for users to learn Mattermost
Docs make Mattermost users self-sufficient.
Having trouble figuring out how to do something on Mattermost? Search our documentation by keyword to find the answers you’re looking for. We also have user, administrator, developer, and integration guides you can read to learn how to do new things.
3. Docs make it easy to improve Mattermost
The more robust our documentation is, the more informed our users and contributors will be when suggesting or adding improvements.
Docs help us continuously improve Mattermost by providing our community information about how features work, how they are architected, and how we make decisions while designing them. We hope to empower our community with confidence by thoroughly informing them about our processes to make it easier to contribute to the project.
Are you interested in collaborating on docs with Mattermost?
If you’re open to writing documentation for the Mattermost project during the Season of Docs, here is the list of projects we’re looking for help from technical writers on. You may also want to check out our documentation style guide to get familiar with our approach.
Those who participate in the Season of Docs project can expect support from the Mattermost team, as well as peer reviews of their work. An editor will review your work to ensure it adheres to our style guide, our product management team will make sure the customer’s perspective is considered, and a developer will check for technical accuracy.
It is our hope that technical writers who participate will have all the resources and input they need to succeed in their chosen project.
By participating in the Season of Docs, we hope that we will grow our community of contributors while strengthening our product and helping technical writers like you gain more experience. For more information, check out the Season of Docs technical writer guide or stop by our contributors’ community channel to say hello.
