Ensuring that Documentation is a First-class Citizen in OS Projects - Ray Paik & Sofia Wallin
Channel: All Things Open
Date: 02/12/2020

Presented by: Ray Paik, Cube Dev & Sofia Wallin, Ericsson Software Technology
Presented at All Things Open 2020 - Community Track

Abstract: We often see many open source projects struggle with maintaining quality documentation and finding contributors who are interested in helping with project documentation. There are a number of reasons for this such as many viewing documentation as a separate product from code, or a belief that people will be able to make sense of what the code is doing by reading the code.  

For these and other reasons, documentation work is often done at the last minute, and done by people with low motivation and minimum effort. So the quality of the output will naturally suffer. These issues can be addressed by making sure that documentation is everyone’s responsibility and that documentation is a core part of the product that is created using the same development and community processes. 

In this session, Sofia will share her learnings as a documentation project lead in OPNFV and ONAP, and how their best practice is used throughout LF Networking. Ray will discuss how community contributions are managed for GitLab documentation and how community members are able to apply learnings from documentation to their contributions to other areas of GitLab.