| Google Season Of Docs 2024 Announced |
| Written by Kay Ewbank |
| Thursday, 15 February 2024 |
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This year's Google Season of Docs has been announced, and as usual will provide direct grants to open source projects to improve their documentation and give professional technical writers an opportunity to gain experience in open source. Google Season of Docs allows open source organizations to apply for a grant of between and $5,000 - $15,000 USD to help improve their documentation. Selected organizations use their grant to directly hire a technical writer to complete their documentation project. Organizations get 40% of the grant after hiring a technical writer, and the remaining 60% of the grant after successful completion of the Google Season of Docs program.
Organizations have up to six months to complete their documentation project, and are expected to complete a case study at the end that outlines the problem the documentation project was intended to solve, what metrics were used to judge the effectiveness of the documentation, and what the organization learned for the future. All the case studies are published on the Season of Docs site at the end of the program. Among the feedback from the 2023 participating projects, the team at Flux described the benefits clearly: "Having a dedicated resource under the banner of GSoD helped as it allowed the team to focus on core activities while leaving out the worries related to the stacking documentation challenges behind, to be taken care of by the writer." The developers at p5.js said: "We made significant improvements to nearly half of the p5.js reference and laid the groundwork for a team of writers currently working on documentation. Along the way, we engaged a broad cross-section of the community and strengthened bonds among core contributors. " Organizations interested in applying need to submit a project page with information including a statement of the problem your project needs to solve; the documentation that might solve this problem; and the metrics for measuring the success of your documentation. Technical writers do not submit a formal application through Google Season of Docs, but instead apply to accepted organizations directly. |
