Mautic applies for Season of Docs 2021

Last year, Mautic took part in the Season of Docs, a project supported by Google that brings together technical writers and open source communities to work on a project for a couple of months.

We are excited to apply again as an organisation.

About the Google Season of Docs

You may have heard of the Google Summer of Code before - this is a similar program but applies specifically to documentation. The goal of the Google Season of Docs is

To provide a framework for technical writers and Open Source projects to work together towards the common goal of improving an Open Source project's documentation.

For technical writers who are new to Open Source, this presents an opportunity to make your first contributions and get started with supporting an Open Source project. For technical writers who might already be contributing in Open Source, the program could be a new way of working together, or an opportunity to explore new projects.

The program brings together technical writers with an Open Source community for a period of a few months, bringing their writing expertise to the project's documentation while learning about the project, community and technology behind it.

Together, we raise public awareness of Open Source documentation, technical writing, and how we can work together to the benefit of the global Open Source community.

The Education Team are excited to be proposing three projects for consideration by the Google Season of Docs team. All three projects are key to helping our users - whether developers, end-users or marketers - better understand how to work with Mautic. Read more about the project proposals below, and if you're interested in learning more do join the Education Team channel on Slack!

Project Idea 1: Improve and update the Mautic Developer Documentation

Problem

• Mautic’s Developer Documentation is outdated and in many areas has incorrect code examples which have not been updated to support Mautic 3.x. This project will primarily focus on auditing and updating the documentation itself.

• The underlying tooling based on Slate should be updated - some work has started on this but we have not got the resources within the community to complete the task. This is a sub-task - a nice to have if you have the skills to help with this.

• There is some end-user focused documentation which should be extracted from the Developer Docs and moved over to the End-User documentation (specifically around themes). This is nice to have and will involve working with the Education Team to transfer the content.

• As a stretch goal, we can consider building out a developer portal. Initial ideas and scoping are being tracked in this Jira issue and this Google Doc.

Measuring project success?

• Resolution of outstanding issues in the issue queue and merging of outstanding pull requests (measured here for issues and here for pull requests),

• Updating Slate to the latest version and deploying with Github Actions when pull requests are merged.

• New contributions to the docs by demonstrating best practices and improving the docs on how to contribute (measured here ),

• An increase in the number of new developers working with Mautic (measured in our Github metrics, downloads and mailing list signups),

• Long term - improved developer sentiment (measured in Community CRM).

What skills would a technical writer need to work on this project?

Must have:

• Familiarity with GitHub, Slate (or comparable tools) and API documentation,

• Experience with Mautic and the Mautic API (or willingness to get up to speed quickly),

• Optionally experience with Grav and Markdown-based content for the stretch goal,

• Strong collaboration skills - you will be working with several teams and having to dig into the codebase and work with the Core Team to ensure that the documentation is top-notch!

Mentors

• Alan Hartless will be the primary mentor for this project,

• Ruth Cheesley can help with answering questions about Mautic and review pull requests for grammar, content and style,

• Favour Kelvin, Education Team Lead, can review pull requests,

• Dennis Ameling can help with Github automation and updating Slate.

Contact info

• Technical writers interested in working on this project should send an email to [email protected] - Please do not contact the mentors directly unless you have a specific question to ask them. Please include links to your technical writing work or portfolio/resumé/CV.

Project Idea 2: Implementing multilingual functionality on the Mautic End-User documentation

Problem

• Mautic is used by a worldwide audience and is available in 64 languages, but the documentation is currently only available in English.

• We would like to implement the facility to add other languages to the End-User Documentation.

• This project will involve implementing the technical details (language switcher etc) and working with the community to run some sprints to get the first translation completed and ready to launch. It will also involve translating technical documentation into Portuguese.

How would we measure success?

• An additional language available in the Mautic Documentation (starting with Portuguese as that is by far the most popular language),

• Increased contributions to the Documentation from new contributors in languages other than English by 50%.

What skills would a technical writer need to work on this project?

Must have:

• Experience with technical writing in languages other than English (preferably Portuguese),

• Familiarity with Github (or willingness to work through GitHub tutorials and learn the basics outside of this project).

Mentors

• Ruth Cheesley and Favour Kelvin will be the primary mentors for this project,

• Rodrigo Demetrio will be able to support reviewing translations in Portuguese.

Contact info

• Technical writers interested in working on this project should send an email to [email protected] - Please do not contact the mentors directly unless you have a specific question to ask them. Please include links to your technical writing work or portfolio/resumé/CV.

Project Idea 3: Adding more articles that answers FAQs in the knowledge base

Problem

• The Mautic Knowledge Base was released last year and already have a handful of articles that focuses on answering FAQs about Mautic.

• We have an increasing demand to support Mautic users FAQs and we don’t have enough articles that cover a lot of this.

• We need to more support articles in the knowledgebase to assist Mautic users.
   

How would we measure success?

• Decrease in the number of support issue and an increase in the number of page views by 50%.

• Increased contributions to the Knowledge base from new contributors by 50%.

What skills would a technical writer need to work on this project?

Must have:

• Familiarity with SEO optimization,

• Familiarity with Github (or willingness to work through GitHub tutorials and learn the basics outside of this project).

Mentors

• Favour Kelvin, Education Team Lead, will be the primary mentor for this project and can review pull requests,

• Ruth Cheesley can help with answering questions about Mautic and review pull requests for grammar, content and style.

Contact info

• Technical writers interested in working on this project should send an email to [email protected] - Please do not contact the mentors directly unless you have a specific question to ask them. Please include links to your technical writing work or portfolio/resumé/CV.