Apply for Google's Season of Docs
Created by: jmgate
What is It?
The Software Sustainability Institute recently had a blog post introducing Google's Season of Docs. The goal of the project is to pair technical writers with open source projects in need of documentation for a three month period starting in September of this year.
In case you're familiar with it, this is similar to Google's Summer of Code project from years ago.
What's the Timeline Look Like?
The complete timeline is available here, but the parts we need to be aware of are:
- April 2nd–23rd: Submit application to Google
- April 30th: Selection of organizations announced
- September 2nd: Doc writing officially starts
- November 29th: Tech writer submits final work products
Who Pays for What?
Google will pay the technical writer ~$6,000 (adjusted for cost of living) over the three month period. They also supply some smaller amount of funding to the institution for the sake of mentoring the technical writer over the course of the season.
How Does the Tech Writer Do the Work?
They work remotely from wherever they happen to be, using whatever remote collaboration means the mentoring organization uses. For us, that'd mean we'd communicate via GitHub issues and pull requests, and if we need to speak in person, we could give them a call. If Sandia wants to fly them out to meet/work in person, that's on us. There's no need on our end for actual hiring, onboarding, etc.
What Do We Need to Do?
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First we need to identify two organization administrators (a primary and a backup) to manage our participation in Season of Docs. I can be one of these, though I don't need to be. -
Generate a list of project ideas. These would be specific tasks that will be accomplished in the three-month program. There's no need to adhere to these 100% once the program starts, but they are intended to give technical writers an accurate idea of what they might be doing with us. To decide what we'd like to focus on, we probably want to bring this up at the next Trilinos leaders' meeting (@maherou, @rppawlo, @mperego, @kddevin, @srajama1, @jwillenbring). If that's too far away, we should probably set up a Skype meeting sooner, because we don't have too much time to get an application together. -
Given the specific tasks above, we need to identify at least two mentors to help bring the tech writer on board and oversee their work throughout the season. -
Then we need to submit our application within the next three weeks.