Season of Docs Do’s and Dont’s

Two weeks ago Google announced the list of accepted technical writers for its inaugural Season of Docs program, and I’m excited to reveal that my application was accepted and I am officially participating this year!

What is Season of Docs?

Let me backtrack—Season of Docs (SoD) is a brand new program organized by Google with the aim of bringing together technical writers and open source organizations so that both mutually benefit—tech writers gain experience working on open source under a mentor, and the organization gains from improved documentation! The project officially runs from September to November (with some longer running projects going up to February 2020). Tech writers have the option of accepting a stipend – the amount depending on which country they apply from.

The program is designed towards early career technical writers, so I was quite fortunate that it came my way just as I graduated from my technical writing program. As anyone who is a recent graduate knows, it’s been a challenge finding employment as everyone wants experience. Season of Docs is a great way to gain that experience, learn new technologies and get introduced to the world of open source as well.

Season of Docs application process

Organization applications: First, open source organizations applied to participate in the SoD program while identifying projects that needed improved documentation.
Exploration phase: Once the final list of accepted organizations was published on the SoD website, interested technical writers could browse through this list, collaborate with the organizations and choose up to three that they wanted to work with.
Application phase: Technical writer applicants then had about a month to write and submit project proposals for their preferred organizations. Note that project proposals are submitted on a Google application form—this only accepts plain text, so don’t go creating fancy tables and diagrams only to sadly not use them later (I may or may not have done this!).
Proposal review: After that it’s a waiting game (about another month) as organizations sifted through all the proposals they received and decided on who made the cut.

My Season of Docs application

Quite a few organizations needed help with their API documentation but considering I had no prior experience with this, I didn’t look too much into those. I eventually narrowed it down to three organizations with projects that weren’t API-related and that I found interesting.

Writing the Project Proposals:

Creating proposals for these projects was quite the task – I was out to impress so I also included sample video tutorials (some had specifically asked for videos) together with a sample written guide. I chose Github to create my sample guides, but WordPress is another option as well. Github forced me to learn Markdown and since it’s widely used in the open source world, I wanted to get familiar with it.

Other sections of my proposals included a detailed audience analysis, task analysis and a proposed Table of Contents.

I think my efforts paid off because even the two organizations I didn’t get in with gave me very positive feedback. Here’s what one of them said:

“I thought you were a very strong applicant and if we could have accepted multiple writers you would have been one of them. I will certainly keep you in mind for the future if we need more documentation help.”

I mention this because there could be a myriad of reasons why your own application wasn’t accepted—competition is tough out there but good work gets noticed. So keep at it!

Season of Docs application tips

Some of my observations from applying to SoD this year:

• Make sure you understand the audience for the project, i.e. who will be reading the documentation. Based on the feedback I received on my proposals, this was important for the organizations. A section of my proposals was dedicated to an ‘Audience Analysis‘ where I described who the different user groups would be, their varying levels of expertise and accordingly what type of documentation they would need.
• Include a sample tutorial or guide for the project in your proposal. Even though SoD specifically says that “the open source organization must be able to make a selection based on the content of the application form rather than on content held elsewhere”, including a link to a sample guide is still deemed acceptable. To be on the safe side, you can also directly send this sample guide to the organization (outside the Google application form) before the application deadline. If the proposed documentation lends itself to video tutorials, creating one will make your application stand out even more (this is the one I created for my accepted proposal and I used Camtasia to make it).
• Proofread your proposal and then do it again! Some applicants had published their project proposals on the forums to get feedback, and I noticed spelling and grammatical errors right away. Obviously this is unacceptable especially from a technical writer.
• Be independent and mindful of others’ time. Quite a few people on the discussion forums I had joined were asking questions whose answers were already on the SoD website (deadlines, procedures etc.). It doesn’t give off a good impression if information has to be repeated just because someone didn’t bother finding out the answers for themselves.
  Read through previous threads in case your question was already asked. Even if the answer isn’t obvious for your problem, try Googling it first and testing out different options before jumping on the forums.
• Use the organization forums for their intended purpose. The forums are meant to share genuine project-related queries and help others out. I saw a lot of postings from interested applicants basically advertising themselves, posting their resumés or just declaring their interest and asking for what to do next.

Conclusion

This is the first year that Google is hosting this program, and based on the enthusiasm of the community, I imagine it will run again in 2020. I found out about SoD through Write the Docs, which is definitely a community you should join if you want to keep abreast of the latest happenings in the tech writing world.

I am going to be working with Oppia for the next 3 months—a learning platform that is all about giving students equal access to education. Right now I’m in the community bonding phase of the project, which means I’m in touch with my mentors, ironing out the details, setting expectations, getting introduced to the team and so on. The next phase—doc development—officially begins September 2nd. I plan to document (ha!) my experience, so watch this space.