Season of Docs is Google's annual program that fosters collaboration between open source projects and professional technical writers.
Season of Docs is a unique program that pairs professional technical writers with open source mentors to introduce the technical writer to an open source community and provide guidance while the writer works on a real-world open source project. The technical writer, in turn, provides documentation expertise to the open source organization.
Projects can cover a wide range of fields including Cloud computing, operating systems, graphics, medicine, programming languages, robotics, science, security and many more. Season of Docs is not a recruiting program or an internship but it does provide invaluable experience and looks great on a resume!
Rocket.Chat has applied, but has not been selected for the 2022 Google Season of Docs program. We intend to try again in 2023, and like to thank Google for the kind consideration this year.
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Rocket.Chat operates a 24 x 7 community server at http://open.rocket.chat Please contact us through the Google Seasons of Docs 2022 channel at https://open.rocket.chat/channel/gsod2022
Interested professional technical writers can directly send us an email to gsod@rocket.chat.
See official GSoD 2022 rules for more information.
Ultimate open source team chat and communications platform
Rocket.Chat is one of the largest active open source (permissive MIT source license) nodeJS communications platform communities on GitHub, connecting 1500+ global community contributors (across projects) from 30+ countries, with 31700+ GitHub stars, 6500 forks, 490+ total releases and 12,000+ issues since inception in 2015.
Rocket.Chat is a modern team chat and collaborating platform written in full-stack JavaScript. Rocket.Chat offers a full featured rich team chat experience on modern browsers, comparable to Slack and Microsoft Teams. Mobile and desktop clients run on iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, and Linux. Rocket.Chat server can scale from a small family messaging server for 5 users running on a Raspberry Pi 4, to clustered micro-services configuration that can support hundred thousands of users. On-premise deployment of Rocket.Chat can ensure 100% complete security and privacy of your valuable communications/data.
Rocket.Chat is now installed on over 500k servers and counts over 12m users worldwide. Rocket.Chat’s long-term vision is to replace email with a real-time federated communications platform globally.
Users can set up Rocket.Chat on cloud or by hosting their own servers on-premises. Thanks to its extension support via Rocket.Chat Apps (plugins), and extremely rich API/SDK support, startups and innovators have customized Rocket.Chat into new products and services. Chatbots extend the interactivity of Rocket.Chat and integrate external IT systems. Omnichannel extends reach to wherever user may be including WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger and more.
Rocket.Chat has won multiple prizes such as a 2016 Bossie Award for Best Open Source Application and first prize in the 2017 edition of All Things Open’s Startup Competition.
Rocket.Chat supports over 59 local languages. Rocket.Chat's community interacts 24 x 7 at the community Rocket.Chat server https://open.rocket.chat since 2015.
Rocket.Chat can be extended through apps. Apps are considerably easier to code than modifying the large Rocket.Chat code base. But we are seriously lacking on documentation for Apps developers.
New app builders have a hard time navigating our existing meager documentation. There is a lack of details and current contents are difficult to understand. This makes building an app a very time consuming activity and causes developers to get frustrated or even abandon their projects.
As it exists today, it is very difficult to develop an app without getting help from an existing app developer or our internal team. The documentation is also not up to date - while the app platform is consistently being updated. Outdated documentation is causing more issues and slows down development ending up with more of the same questions asked multiple times.
This writer will
- Design the ideal layout and content flow which should improve the learning experience of new developers.
- Update the existing articles on GitBook with the help of GSoD administrator, including automatically generated API references, existing articles, webinar contents and code comments.
- Identify any gaps, as in missing pieces in the documentation.
- Fill the identified gaps by adding supporting documentation.
- Incorporate feedback from documentation testers (volunteer testers from our community) and the wider Rocket.Chat community.
- Collaborate with project administrators to validate and test the documentation and identify any opportunities of improvement.
- Update current READMEs to help new contributors navigate to the right resources including how to create Rocket.Chat Apps and resources around Git and Pull Requests.
- 50% increase in @rocket.chat/apps-cli weekly downloads.
- Reduced number of common queries from the community.
- Increase in the number of members in Developers of Rocket.Chat Apps team and the team channels on our Open Community Server.
Standard 3 month project.
| Type | Amount | Running Total | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Writer | $6000 | $6000 | Writer stipend |
| Volunteers | $500 ($200 x 2) | $6400 | For swags and other incentive items |
| Total | $6400 |