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GSoD Project Report under CHAOSS Project (The Linux Foundation)

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Jaskirat Singh edited this page Dec 7, 2020 · 25 revisions

Project Report for Google Season of Docs 2020

Google Season of Docs is Google's attempt to connect experienced technical writers with open-source software organizations. By doing this, they hope to raise awareness about open source among the technical writing communities, and about technical documentation among the open-source communities. The open source projects work with the technical writers to improve the project's documentation and processes. Together they may choose to build a new documentation set, or redesign the existing docs, or improve and document the open source community's contribution procedures and onboarding experience. Open-source organizations share their project ideas and technical writers apply to the respective project in order to work in a 3 month span. The organizations then pick the writers they want to work with, and the work began 💻 ✍️ 🏃‍♀

Projects were expected to be completed within 3 months, largely. A few projects, designated as long-running ones, were for 5 months.

I worked with CHAOSS project under The Linux Foundation

📆 August 6, 2020 to December 5, 2020

About the Project

Working groups within the CHAOSS community had developed their own ways of working and documented their disparate processes to varying degrees. Working Groups includes Common Metrics WG, Diversity & Inclusion WG, Evolution, Risk, and Value working groups which had set up their own participating and working ways and adapted different ways of communication and work culture. These working groups in accordance with metrics had different focus areas and backgrounds which works for appropriate metrics lead various researches and development under respective working groups category and know the right pathway to lead various researches and development under respective categories but the processes for newcomers and existing contributors were not known that how to participate or take the right path for respective workings. As a result of this, the things within the CHAOSS community were not standardized. 🧐 Therefore to know the right process and basic fundamentals of the work culture across the community, the goal of the community handbook was to centralize critical information and standardize parts of it across the CHAOSS project. The critical information and standardization parts majorly focused on the processes that CHAOSS uses so that CHAOSS have the agreement of how community accomplishes work, How newcomers can participate and follow the fundamentals of the community and what processes and pathway newcomers or existing members have to follow for availing the leadership within the CHAOSS community.

So taking above thing into consideration, I developed the CHAOSS Community-wide handbook 📓 which serve as an instruction manual for existing and new community members on how to get work done in the CHAOSS project. This project involves a creative component of collecting and organizing content for the handbook as well as a technical component of defining how to represent the handbook.

Project Mentors

Project Deliverables

I proposed various things within my project. This was my Work Timeline which I used to complete the various tasks in a specified time period.

Goals Comments Completed
CHAOSS community Values I wrote about different values that CHAOSS should live on and discussed the community. It was a good research though since from the start of the project. ✔️
Roadmap I drafted the roadmap of metrics, metric release, software release, and working groups. ✔️
Roles and Responsibilities This section includes the different roles and responsibilities for "Repository Maintainer", "CHAOSScon Organizing committee Member", "CHAOSS Governing Board Member", "CHAOSS Board Co-Lead", "CHAOSS Metrics Release Collaborator", "Editor of CHAOSSweekly", "Mailing list moderator", "Twitter Manager", "Code of Conduct Enforcement Team Member", "Mentor (e.g., GSoC or Outreachy)", "Contributor", and "New Member" ✔️
Community Guidelines This section includes the general ethics one needs to follow while contributing towards the community. ✔️
Path to Leaderships This includes various processes and requirements for different leaderships like Technical, Governance, and Operational leadership. ✔️
Terminology This includes the detailed information regarding he terminology which is used inside the CHAOSS community. It is more detailed to CHAOSS specific, committees, working groups and mentorship terms. It also includes the usage of these terms ✔️
General FAQ This includes the frequently asked questions that a newcomer or sometimes the existing community member encounters. ✔️
CHAOSS History This is one of the exciting page within the handbook which includes the detailed information about the CHAOSS history. For this section I also interviewed various core people to understand the evolution of the CHAOSS ✔️
Working Groups This includes the detailed information about different working group and process to introduce the focus areas ✔️
Metric This includes the information about the process of getting metric approved to be visible on the website of CHAOSS ✔️
CHAOSScon CHAOSScon is the conference of the CHAOSS community and this page includes the whole information of various processes involved within the CHAOSScon ✔️
CHAOSScast CHAOSScast is the poadcast of the CHAOSS community and this page includes the whole information of various processes involved within the CHAOSS poadcast ✔️
Development This section includes the development contribution guide with all detailed information abut technicalities and requirements needed for contribution ✔️
Documentation This section includes the documentation contribution guide with all detailed information with style guide and workflow needed for the contribution ✔️
Design This section includes the design contribution guide with all detailed information abut technicalities and requirements needed for contribution. It also includes the CHAO visual identity and workflow to follow for design contribution ✔️
Outreach This includes the detailed information on how to contribute in marketing or outreach of the CHAOSS community. ✔️
Mentorships This includes the mentorship detaile where CHAOSS has been participating since long (GSoC, GSoD, and Outreachy). It also includes the roles and responsibilities for students as well as mentors participating in these programs with CHAOSS community. ✔️

Project Planning and Maintenance

I am a methodical person who loves to structure and organize the things and as a result during my 3 months project I maintained one repository named as jaskiratsingh2000 / Google-Season-of-Docs which I used as to track my whole progress.

I used to meet within the GSoD office hours with my mentors and co-writer every Thursday of a week where we used to discuss upon various obstacles, new additions, and feedback towards the project. So all the logs of the meeting can be found here.

Weekly Updates

I maintained the series of things in order to keep others updated about my project.

Community bonding (August 17, 2020 - September 13, 2020)

Doc Development (September 14, 2020 - November 30, 2020)

Analytics towards Project

Project Glimpse

It was really fun working on this project as got to learn about many things while researching around various sections that were required to be written. The most enjoyable part for me was to know about the CHAOSS History. I interviewed Kate Stewart (Sr. Director of Strategic Programs, The Linux Foundation), Dawn Foster (Director of Open Source Community Strategy, VMware), Georg Link (Director of Sales, Bitergia and Co-Founder CHAOSS), Daniel Izquierdo Cortázar, (Co-Founder of Bitergia), and Luis Cañas Díaz (Co-Founder of Bitergia) Below are the snapshots that I took after every interview.

These are some of the screenshots from the GitBook platform where the community handbook exists.

Acknowledgments

I am very much grateful 🥰 to the members of CHAOSS project, The Linux Foundation, and Google Season of Docs team for the smooth and cooperative processes for various things through the 3 months. Special thanks to my mentors - Georg J.P.link, Matt Germonprez, and Armstrong Foundjem for supporting me with new ideas, feedbacks, and improvements towards my project. It was really a great experience for me.

Learnings

The past 3 months have been a valuable learning experience and these experiences will help me make successful future contributions to the open-source world.

  • Learned the various required researches in different domains
  • Embrace changes and be ready to adapt to newer opportunities in case you have to re-scope your original proposal.
  • When scoping time for the project, always allow time for roadblocks, setting up the work environment, and establishing communication channels with the community.
  • Be open-minded and flexible to use the tools and conventions that the community uses.
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