I won’t mince words here – several pages in the Make/Community handbook are outdated and need to be updated. With recent changes to our program – especially with the shift to online events, some documents have become redundant. Many other documents that are still relevant, have not been updated to incorporate the latest changes. In this background, our docs could benefit from a structured, pro-active approach to make sure that they stay current and accurate.
To achieve this goal, I propose a documentation editing sprint for the Community team!
What is a documentation editing sprint?
Community contributors and deputies Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. work together to audit, and edit outdated documents in the Community team handbooks and any related documentation pages, so that they provide accurate and up-to-date information for our community members.
What are the documents that we will be editing?
We should audit, review, and edit the following documents in our Community team handbook:
Since the community team actively works on the Learn WordPress project, it would help to review and make changes to the Learn WordPress handbook as well – if we have the bandwidth.
When do we do it?
I propose that we test this out by organizing an initial sprint exactly two weeks later on May 25th – which is also known as the Towel Day (no points for guessing – I’m a Douglas Adams fan! 🙈). If the initial sprint goes well, we can consider organizing multiple sprints throughout the rest of the year. Community members can work on editing the documentation pages at their own convenience throughout the course of the day.
Who can participate/Who edits the docs?
This initiative is open to all! Many Community deputies Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. have edit access to the Make/Community site, they can perhaps edit the documents directly. Other community already members can propose changes in a shared Google doc which can later be merged with the main document.
How do we do it?
It would help to keep track of all the documents and their changes in spreadsheets, or using collaboration tools such as Trello Project management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing.. Perhaps, before the sprint day, a few deputies can do a pre-event sweep to identify the docs that need to be edited, and encourage contributors to work on those selected documents? Contributors can use a shared Google sheet to update the status of the edits they made and the work they did. We can use the #community-team Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel to coordinate the efforts. The efforts can be spread out throughout the day so that folks can work at their own pace.
Following the event, we publish a recap post to share about the changes that were made during the sprint. If it is successful, we can probably repeat the event later and perhaps even consider organizing regular documentation editing sprints (either once per quarter or once every month).
Request for feedback
- First of all, what do you think about this idea and the proposed format? Is this something the community team should carry out?
- Do you know of any specific documents from our handbook that need edits? If so, please share them in the comments.
- The biggest question: How do we track progress – both contributions from individual community members and changes made to the documents?
Please share your feedback by May 20th (Thursday).
#documentation-sprint #community-team
